In a current tweet, Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz questions the reason behind the current KelpDAO exploit.
On April 18, KelpDAO, a liquid restaking protocol, suffered a significant exploit, dropping over $290 million. In an replace shortly after, LayerZero acknowledged that the KelpDAO incident was remoted to its rsETH configuration, immediately ensuing from its single-DVN setup. LayerZero famous that the topic of the extremely refined assault was the poisoning of the downstream RPC infrastructure utilized by the LayerZero Labs DVN.
Per week after the incident, the crypto group continues to hunt solutions about what transpired in what’s known as the most important DeFi hack to this point in 2026.
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On this mild, Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz referred to an X reply by LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino in December 2024, the place he acknowledged that not one of the protocol’s quantity relied solely on its Decentralized Verifier Community (DVN).
“What share of LZ quantity depends solely on LZ DVN? The reply to that’s 0%. There is not a single utility setup that solely makes use of the LZ DVN,” Pellegrino stated on the time.
Did one thing change?
In response, Schwartz questions whether or not one thing has modified between late 2024 and now. This begs the query: if no utility beforehand relied solely on a single DVN, how may that very same configuration now be stated to be the basis reason for the KelpDAO exploit?
“Did one thing change between December of 2024 and now? As a result of except I am confused, that is saying that the assault on KelpDAO couldn’t have occurred as LayerZero described it,” Schwartz questioned.
If KelpDAO did in reality function with a single-DVN configuration, it raises questions on whether or not the system structure modified after LayerZero’s CEO’s feedback in 2024 or whether or not the sooner claims weren’t correct.
Alongside these strains, Ripple’s head of analysis Aanchal Malhotra, in a current tweet, shared a number of ideas on the rsETH hack, noting that “the business is shifting towards higher primitives—ZK proving, tighter audit requirements. However primitives alone aren’t sufficient. Till safety proofs and deployment environments are evaluated collectively, the hole stays.”

