DeFi falls into the most dangerous prisoner's dilemma in history

After being hacked for over 40 hours, the chain reaction triggered by Kelp DAO continues to ferment, with more and more well-known projects like Aave, LayerZero, Arbitrum involved, even reaching the point where some popular narratives face a death sentence.

Renowned KOL Feng Wuxiang stated on the X platform that only ETH is safe now, and ARB has also authorized freezing and transferring customer assets. No L2 is truly an L2 anymore. L2 rose with Arbitrum, and it also perished with Arbitrum.

Another well-known KOL, Blue Fox, said that the biggest loss from the Kelp incident was not Aave or Kelp, but LayerZero, which was too shortsighted to see the true essence of the event. The core issue of this incident is not disproving L2 (even if it’s fake L2), but disproving cross-chain bridges.

An increasing number of fierce opinions are emerging in public discourse, with parties involved each sticking to their own narratives and blaming each other, making the Kelp DAO theft a typical window into the debate over security responsibility, pragmatism versus technological fundamentalism.

1. L0 Disproved? Cross-Chain Bridges as the Biggest Loser

The key point of the incident is LayerZero’s detailed hacker attack report released yesterday, which preliminarily identifies the attacker as North Korea-linked Lazarus Group. The attack was carried out by poisoning its decentralized verification network (DVN) relying on downstream RPC infrastructure. The attacker controlled some RPC nodes and coordinated DDoS attacks to induce the system to switch to malicious nodes, thus forging cross-chain transactions.

“Using compromised nodes to poison RPC infrastructure, combined