LayerZero faces a negligence and defamation suit over the $292 million KelpDAO hack

LayerZero, its Canadian arm and CEO Bryan Pellegrino were named as defendants Thursday in a negligence and defamation claim before British Columbia’s top trial court.

Evercrest Technologies, which runs KelpDAO, ties the case to the April 18 heist of 116,500 rsETH, which was worth about $292 million at the time.

USDT0 got a verifier warning Evercrest never received, the claim alleges

Filed in the Vancouver registry, the claim adds negligent misrepresentation to the counts and seeks aggravated and punitive damages in addition to the ordinary ones.

LayerZero’s own verifier was the only one needed to sign off before rsETH locked on one chain could be minted on another. Kelp’s bridge utilized a 1-of-1 decentralized verifier network or DVN.

The exploit was “a failure of LayerZero’s own security infrastructure,” Evercrest’s filing says.

Evercrest alleges LayerZero told it on Feb. 2, 2024, that the default setting presented “no problem.” The claim says that on March 21, 2024, LayerZero told Evercrest to clone the 1-of-1 setup of another bridge.

LayerZero’s pitch, dated Jan. 2025 in the filing, was a redundant and monitored verifier network, where a compromised verifier could at most “fail to verify a message correctly.”

USDT0 received a different message. Evercrest says that Kelp never received a warning, while LayerZero warned the USDT0 developer about the risks of default verifier setups in late 2024 or early 2025, and that developer went on to run its own verifier.

Withdrawals topped $650 million after the April 18 exploit

The claim puts the breach inside of LayerZero. According to Evercrest, the attacker’s entry point was a single LayerZero developer’s computer compromised via social engineering and malware, and the rsETH transaction was sent on April 18 at around 17:35 UTC.

The filing says Kelp shut down its planned sbUSD stablecoin after the attack and is moving rsETH to another cross-chain security standard. Kelp selected Chainlink’s CCIP in May, reported Cryptopolitan.

According to Evercrest, KelpDAO withdrawals have topped $650 million since April.

The count of defamation relates to LayerZero’s reaction to the hack. Its post-mortem said Kelp’s setup “directly contradicts” the multi-DVN model LayerZero advocates.

Evercrest folds that line and Pellegrino’s public blame into its case.

Pellegrino said in May that Kelp’s account was “completely untrue” and that Kelp was launched on LayerZero’s multi-DVN default and converted to 1-of-1 itself, Cryptopolitan reported.

He responded to the new filing on X, saying the claim “continues to be meritless” and that he would defend himself.

Cryptopolitan reported that 47% of active LayerZero app contracts were running 1-of-1 setups at the time of the exploit, a setup LayerZero has since banned.