Incident All ledgers
Kelp: $293.0m
Kelp lost $293.0m on 18 April 2026. Ranked 15th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 18 April 2026
- Lost
- $293.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Bridge & Cross-Chain
- Method
- Cross-Chain Message Spoofing
- Chains
- Ethereum, Arbitrum
On April 18, 2026, Kelp DAO's rsETH bridge lost $293 million after attackers socially engineered access to LayerZero RPC nodes and injected fake cross-chain messages; a 1-of-1 verifier setup left 20 chains exposed. The attack was attributed to Lazarus Group.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 15th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 5th in 2026.
- It accounts for 45.2% of the $648.1m in known losses in April 2026.
- 56 incidents in the ledger are classified as Bridge & Cross-Chain, for $1.53bn in total. This one is 19.1% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 06 Oct 2022 | Binance Bridge | $570.0m | DeFi Protocol | Proof Verifier Bug | — |
| 06 Sept 2026 | Liquid Network | $320.0m | Chain | Unbacked Cross-Chain Mint | — |
| 01 Aug 2022 | Nomad | $190.0m | DeFi Protocol | Forged Proof | — |
| 16 May 2018 | Bitcoin Gold | $18.0m | Chain | Forged Proof | — |
| 04 Oct 2021 | pNetwork | $13.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spoofed Event Log | — |
All failures in 2026 · The failures ledger
Amounts are DefiLlama’s estimates and can change as incidents are revalued. Its returned figure can include money a company repaid itself, not only funds recovered from attackers. Source: DefiLlama.
Cite this Bitminer.io, “Kelp, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/kelp-2026-04-18/. How this is built