Kelp DAO Attacker Launders 175M in ETH Post-Freeze

The attacker responsible for draining nearly 290 million in cryptocurrency from Kelp DAO on April 18 has begun laundering a significant portion of the stolen funds, transferring about 75,700 Ether worth roughly 175 million to new addresses on the Ethereum mainnet on Tuesday. This activity follows an emergency freeze by the Arbitrum Security Council, which secured 30,766 Ether valued at approximately 71 million linked to the exploit on the Arbitrum One network.

The initial breach targeted Kelp DAO's LayerZero-powered bridge for restaked Ether, or rsETH, exploiting a vulnerability in the protocol's decentralized verifier network setup. Officials from LayerZero stated that the configuration relied on a single verifier path for cross-chain messages, creating a point of failure despite prior warnings against such an approach. The attacker drained 116,500 rsETH, equivalent to 290 million to 293 million at the time, by compromising RPC infrastructure and forging transactions through a coordinated denial-of-service attack on validation nodes. Kelp DAO paused affected contracts to contain the damage and has since replaced compromised systems, with LayerZero confirming its core protocol...