Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced that the DeFi United initiative has secured sufficient funds to restore the full backing of rsETH following the April 18 LayerZero bridge exploit. Execution remains pending, subject to governance votes and the finalization of indicative agreements. Aave has also aligned with KelpDAO and LayerZero on the technical steps required to carry out the recovery plan.

Over the weekend, Aave submitted a governance proposal to the Arbitrum DAO requesting the release of 30,765.67 ETH frozen by the Arbitrum Security Council in connection with the exploit. If approved, the funds would be directed into a 2-of-3 Gnosis Safe controlled by Aave Labs, KelpDAO, and Certora, and applied solely toward restoring rsETH's backing. The full AIP governance process is estimated to take approximately 49 days to complete. Aave expects to release a detailed recovery plan and next steps for affected users in the coming days.

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Aave service provider TokenLogic published a governance proposal to allocate a 25,000 ETH contribution from the Aave DAO treasury toward DeFi United, a coordinated recovery effort aimed at fully restoring the backing of KelpDAO's rsETH. Aave calculates a residual funding gap of approximately 75,081 ETH, after accounting for 30,766 ETH frozen by the Arbitrum Security Council and expected liquidation recoveries from the attacker's positions on Aave and Compound.

DeFi United is led by Aave service providers and includes contributions from Lido, EtherFi, Ethena, Ink, BGD Labs, Stani Kulechov, Emilio, Ernesto, and the Golem Foundation, with additional pledges expected. Mantle has separately committed a 30,000 ETH credit facility to the coalition. With Aave's 25,000 ETH contribution added, approximately 5,511 ETH of the residual gap remains, which the coalition expects will be covered.

Any additional public donations received after the proposal is approved will not reduce Aave's treasury commitment, instead it will be directed toward repaying Mantle's credit facility. Once gathered in full, the coalition will place the full 120,015 ETH into the LayerZero lockbox to execute the recovery. The proposal will advance to a Snapshot vote by AAVE token holders.

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LayerZero published a statement claiming the $290 million KelpDAO exploit stemmed from a sophisticated RPC-poisoning attack that manipulated its DVN's verification process. It attributed the attack to the TraderTraitor subgroup of North Korea's Lazarus Group. According to LayerZero, the attackers compromised RPC nodes and fed forged data directly to the DVN while masking activity from monitoring systems.

LayerZero Labs placed responsibility on KelpDAO, arguing its 1-of-1 DVN configuration enabled the exploit, even though LayerZero's own DVN was the sole verifier KelpDAO relied on. LayerZero stated that it will no longer support single-DVN setups. The company also did not outline any intentions to compensate impacted users. Aave subsequently froze WETH and LST markets as the exploit rippled through DeFi.

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Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed.