%{{tag.tag}} {{articledata.title}} {{moment(articledata.cdate)}} @{{articledata.company.replace(" ","")}} comment Kelp DAO was hit by a major exploit on Friday that drained roughly 116,500 rsETH, worth about $292 million, in what has quickly become one of the largest DeFi security incidents of the year. The stolen amount represents about 18% of rsETH’s circulating supply, and the fallout has already spread into lending markets that accepted the token as collateral. The incident appears to have been tied to a spoofed cross-chain message involving Kelp’s bridge infrastructure. Kelp said it had identified suspicious activity involving rsETH and moved to pause deposits and withdrawals across mainnet and several layer-2 networks while it investigates alongside LayerZero, Unichain, auditors and outside security specialists. What gives the exploit more weight is how quickly it spilled into the rest of DeFi. The attacker moved funds into lending venues including Aave V3, Compound V3 and Euler, borrowing against the stolen collateral and building more than $236 million in debt positions. On-chain data cited in the report said the attacker later consolidated around 74,000 ETH (CRYPTO: $ETH ), creating more than $280 million in bad debt across protocols. Aave responded by freezing rsETH markets on both Aave V3 and Aave V4, while stressing that its own smart contracts had not been exploited and that the issue originated with rsETH. Other protocols also moved to contain risk. SparkLend and Fluid took similar steps, Lido Finance paused deposits into its earnETH product because of rsETH exposure, and Ethena temporarily paused its own LayerZero OFT bridges from Ethereum mainnet as a precaution, despite saying it had no direct rsETH exposure. The bigger takeaway is not just the size of the loss, but the way it exposed how fast bridge risk can ripple across interconnected lending and staking systems. For a market that has spent the past year trying to look more mature, this was a sharp reminder that infrastructure failures still have a way of turning into ecosystem-wide stress almost immediately. Aave (CRYPTO: $AAVE ) is currently trading at $96.17 U.S. per digital token.