Ethereum cash withdrawal platform Kelp and decentralized lending protocol Aave have completed a series of steps to restore rsETH support, including burning the operator’s rsETH tokens.
Kelp DAO detailed a post-exploit recovery for its liquid staking token rsETH on Tuesday, confirming that the hacker’s tokens were burned on the layer-2 Arbitrum network.
The 117,132 rsETH, currently worth about $278 million, will be gradually replenished over two weeks by Aave Recovery Guardian, a multi-signature wallet operated by the DeFi United recovery group and Kelp’s own recovery vault in the LayerZero OFT adapter, a smart contract that handles the locking, mining, burning and releasing of rsETH during cross-chain transfers.
Kelp DAO confirmed that rsETH on mainnet and layer-2 networks, with a market cap of $1.5 billion, remains fully supported at all times.
The move to restore liquid staking tokens will bring users affected by one of this year’s biggest DeFi exploits one step closer to recovery.
Kelp was April hacked when attackers, widely attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, exploited the rSETH adapter bridge contract, the software that manages the platform’s fluid recovery token, and lost approximately $293 million.
Blockchain security company OpenZeppelin reported at the time no bug in smart contracts had been publicly identified, adding that “the system failed operationally,” and this is a risk category that the DeFi industry has “consistently underweighted.”
Tracking the exploited funds. Source: Cyvers
Withdrawals will resume within 24 hours
Kelp said it will resume withdrawals “tentatively within 24 hours” after the first tranche is returned to the smart contract. All rSETH transactions, including deposits, redemptions, bridging and claims, will resume as usual after contracts are reactivated.
The protocol has also completed a “security hardening pass,” and security bridging now requires four independent attestors and 64 block assertions, while deprecating some layer 2 routes.
Related: At least a dozen crypto entities attacked since the Drift Protocol hack
The company is also migrating to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) for “further enhanced cross-chain bridging.”
Derivatives traders are undeterred by DeFi hacks
Kelp is a prominent liquid withdrawal protocol on Ethereum, primarily built on top of EigenLayer, where users deposit funds $ETH or other supported liquid staking tokens for additional returns.
The total value of the protocol reached an all-time high of just over $2 billion in September 2025, but has since fallen by around 26% to $1.55 billion. according to to DeFiLlama.
Cointelegraph reported this week that statistics showed this $ETH derivatives traders keep stable and have not turned bearish despite recent DeFi exploits.
However, spot prices fell about 1% on the day, with Ether falling to a 12-day low of $2,260 in late trading on Tuesday.