Kelp team to conduct rsETH contract operations with Aave over next 24 hours. No user action needed; await official updates.

Kelp DAO has announced that its team will carry out rsETH contract operations involving Aave over a 24‑hour window, clarifying that no user action is required and that users should wait for official updates. This operational window is part of the ongoing coordinated recovery and normalization process following the April 2026 exploit of Kelp’s rsETH bridge and the resulting bad debt on Aave. In April 2026, an attacker exploited KelpDAO’s single‑verifier LayerZero Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) bridge, minting about 116,500 unbacked rsETH on Ethereum—roughly 18% of rsETH supply at the time—then using it as collateral across Aave markets to borrow large amounts of WETH and other assets. The exploit did not compromise Kelp’s core restaking contracts or EigenLayer delegations; instead it abused the bridge adapter, which released tokens from escrow based on a forged message. Aave subsequently froze rsETH and related markets and accumulated an estimated $170M+ in bad debt concentrated in WETH and some wstETH positions. Since then, Kelp DAO, Aave, and a DeFi recovery group have pursued a staged remediation plan that includes burning the exploiter’s rsETH on Arbitrum and other networks and progressively refilling 117,132 rsETH into the LayerZero OFT adapter from an Aave Recovery Guardian multisig and Kelp’s recovery safe. Kelp has stated that mainnet and L2 rsETH remain fully backed, and it has conducted a “security hardening” pass: bridge operations now require multiple independent attestors, longer confirmation times, and a planned migration toward Chainlink CCIP for cross‑chain messaging. The newly announced 24‑hour contract‑operation window with Aave likely relates to these coordinated refills, contract reconfigurations, and/or staged unpausing of rsETH markets and withdrawals, but users are explicitly told not to change their positions and instead wait for further official communication from Kelp and Aave.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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