Kelp DAO

Kelp DAO was launched in 2023 by Amitej Gajjala and an India-based team on top of EigenLayer: users deposit ETH for rsETH, earning restaking yield while keeping liquidity.

In May 2024 Kelp closed a private round of more than $9 million with DWF Labs, Hypersphere and Laser Digital; rsETH passed $2 billion in TVL that year, making it Ethereum's second-largest LRT.

On December 10, 2024 Kernel's shared-security mainnet launched, folding Kelp, Kernel and Gain into KernelDAO; KERNEL completed its TGE on April 14, 2025, with Binance's Megadrop distributing 4%.

On April 18, 2026 Kelp's rsETH bridge was attacked: attackers socially engineered a LayerZero developer, poisoned RPC responses and DDoSed the DVN into fallback, then forged a message through a 1-of-1 verification setup, draining 116,500 rsETH worth about $292 million in 46 minutes.

Kelp paused contracts, yet a roughly $174.5 million shortfall remained and KERNEL collapsed from $0.47 to $0.06; the team said it would migrate to Chainlink CCIP, while Aave absorbed more than $200 million in bad debt.

The Kelp incident was 2026's largest DeFi failure, making single-verifier bridges and LRT collateral risk standard items in every protocol review.

On April 18, 2026 an attacker exploited the 1-of-1 verifier configuration on Kelp's LayerZero bridge, forging cross-chain messages to take 116,500 rsETH worth about $292 million at the time, the largest DeFi exploit of the first half. LayerZero blamed the single-verifier setup while Kelp said the deployment had been reviewed and approved in writing; US authorities attributed the attack to the Lazarus subgroup TraderTraitor.

rsETH fell to about 0.71 ETH within hours, Aave froze rsETH markets with estimated bad debt of $177-196 million, and Aave's TVL dropped by more than $6 billion. In May a US court blocked Arbitrum DAO from moving 30,766 frozen ETH, and on September 25 Kelp sued LayerZero and co-founder Bryan Pellegrino; the bridge has been switched to Chainlink CCIP as the replacement.

Kelp DAO's repair is really a trade of reach for safety: rsETH's cross-chain surface is being cut from a dozen-plus networks to the few with the deepest usage and integrations, the switch to Chainlink CCIP went live on Base, Mantle and Ink on 5 October, and verification moved from a single signer to four independent attestors with block confirmations raised from 42 to 64, at the cost of throughput and latency. On the capital side, more than $300 million of ETH commitments through DeFi United restored backing above 100% within five weeks, but roughly $190 million of Aave bad debt and $71 million frozen by Arbitrum are unresolved, and how losses are shared decides whether deposits return. The next contest is verifiable reserves and audit cadence, not yield.

Amitej Gajjala, co-founder, is an alumnus of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management and previously served as Assistant Vice President at Swiggy and as a consultant at AT Kearney. He co-founded Stader Labs in 2021 and launched Kelp DAO in 2023.

Dheeraj Borra, co-founder and engineering lead, holds a B.Tech in computer science from IIT Kharagpur and an M.S. from the University of Texas at Austin, and worked as an engineer at LinkedIn, PayPal and Blend Labs before co-founding Kelp DAO in 2023, where he runs engineering.

Eshwar Nilankantan, business lead, holds an MBA from an Indian Institute of Management with 14 years of Web2 and Web3 scaling experience, running ecosystem expansion and market-maker relations.

Kelp was spun out of the Stader team and the two projects share part of their research and engineering bench.