North Korea's Lazarus Group drained $290 million from Kelp DAO by compromising two RPC nodes feeding Layer Zero's single DVN, swapping the binary for a malicious one, and DDoSing clean nodes to force a failover. In 46 minutes, Kelp DAO managed to stop the bleed — but not before $290M was gone and DeFi TVL dropped $13 billion in 48 hours. Now Layer Zero and Kelp DAO are fighting publicly, with third-party analysts largely blaming Layer Zero for a default setup that left 40% of protocols exposed to a one-of-one verifier configuration.
Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins sit down with Michael Bentley, builder of the Euler lending protocol, to work through who bears responsibility, what a whole-government response to Lazarus Group actually looks like, whether AI can close the security gap, and what it would take for DeFi to finally price and transfer its own risk.
This clip is from a longer conversation on DeFi security, the $290M Kelp DAO hack, and the future of yield-bearing stablecoins. Full episode here: https://youtube.com/live/tB5_2lUy4fs We go live every Monday at 4:30 PM ET — subscribe to catch it live.
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