The Kelp and Aave protocols have initiated asset recovery following an April hack that resulted in a loss of $292 million. Developers aim to recover 117,132 rsETH within two weeks.
Kelp and Aave have successfully completed a series of steps for rsETH backing, including burning the exploiter’s rsETH on Arbitrum.
— Kelp (@KelpDAO) May 12, 2026
117,132 rsETH will be progressively refilled from Aave Recovery Guardian and Kelp Recovery Safe into the LayerZero OFT adapter on mainnet over the…
The first tranche of funds will be transferred to the mainnet shortly. Following this, Kelp will enable asset withdrawals—expected to occur within 24 hours. Users will regain access to deposits, minting, and cross-chain transfers.
The Kelp team has updated the security settings of the LayerZero bridge. Now, four independent nodes are required to confirm transactions instead of one, and the number of necessary blocks has increased from 42 to 64. The protocol has also begun transitioning to Chainlink's CCIP technology.
Aave representatives confirmed the commencement of payouts and burned the rsETH tokens that the hacker held on the Arbitrum network.
The first set of steps in the rsETH technical recovery plan are complete, including burning the exploiter's rsETH on Arbitrum. Progressively refilling the LayerZero OFT adapter and reopening rsETH operations will follow over the coming days. https://t.co/p1tiIzp5Nr
— Aave (@aave) May 12, 2026
Previously, the lending protocol team challenged in court the freezing of some funds imposed due to lawsuits from terrorism victims against North Korea. The court allowed the assets to be transferred to the protocol but prohibited their sale until a final decision is made.
LayerZero developers acknowledged their fault in the incident. The company confirmed that the default security configuration was insufficiently protected for protocols with large amounts of locked funds.
In April, Kelp suffered an attack allegedly orchestrated by the Lazarus Group. This hack became the largest in the DeFi sector this year.
In May, Aave liquidated the remaining positions of the Kelp hacker in rsETH as part of an approved recovery plan.
Later, the Arbitrum community supported the transfer of 30,765 ETH worth $70 million to the DeFi United fund.