The Kelp DAO Hack Wasn't a Smart Contract Exploit. It Was an RPC Infrastructure Attack.
The Kelp DAO hack on April 18th resulted in a loss of $292 million due to an infrastructure attack rather than a smart contract exploit. The attack was executed by the Lazarus Group, which compromised RPC nodes used for transaction verification. This incident highlights vulnerabilities in the RPC layer that are often overlooked in security audits.
- ▪The Kelp DAO hack drained $292 million in just 46 minutes.
- ▪The attack involved compromising RPC nodes and launching a DDoS attack on clean nodes.
- ▪Aave froze rsETH markets due to potential bad debt risks after the exploit.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | DEV Community |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/getblockapi/the-kelp-dao-hack-wasnt-a-smart-contract-exploit-it-was-an-rpc-infrastructure-attack-10f1 |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:21:59 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T18:31:49.574Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T18:31:49.574Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wrfmMoGqnHxf |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 860824) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } GetBlock Posted on Apr 28 The Kelp DAO Hack Wasn't a Smart Contract Exploit. It Was an RPC Infrastructure Attack. #blockchain #ethereum #security #web3 The Kelp DAO Hack Wasn't a Smart Contract Exploit. It Was an RPC Infrastructure Attack. On April 18th, $292 million was drained from Kelp DAO's bridge in 46 minutes. Every post-mortem you've read focused on the 1-of-1 DVN configuration on LayerZero. That's the right conversation — but it's not where the attack actually executed.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV Community.
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