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Overseas demand for U.S equities is growing, says Kraken senior VP Johan Kerbrart

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Overseas demand for U.S equities is growing, says Kraken senior VP Johan Kerbrart

Demand for U.S. equities is rising globally, pushing investors to look beyond domestic markets, Robinhood senior VP and general manager in charge of crypto, Johann Kerbrat said during a Fireside chat at Consensus 2026 in Miami.

“We are seeing a lot of demand for U.S. stocks from overseas investors, particularly tied to AI-related companies,” Kerbrat said, adding that access remains limited in many regions compared with the United States.

Kerbrat said investors should shift from country-specific strategies toward global allocation now that international 24/7 trading platforms are available to them. “It is time for a lot of investors to really think about not just how to invest in one specific country, but also how to have a global portfolio,” he said.

The Kraken executive pointed to tokenization and around-the-clock trading as key enablers. “We think it is going to be 24/7. We think it is going to be instant settlement,” he said, describing features that could differentiate tokenized assets from traditional brokerage products.

The discussion, moderated by Crypto in America host Eleanor Terrett, also addressed regulatory constraints in the United States. Kerbrat said “regulation in the U.S. has been less than friendly in the past,” though he noted recent engagement with policymakers has improved.

Robinhood has launched tokenized stock products in Europe using a derivative model that tracks underlying assets, with plans to expand access to additional asset classes including private equity. Kerbrat said the goal is broader participation in markets that have historically been limited to accredited investors.

“I think it is really important to give them the choice to be able to invest in it before it goes public,” he said, referring to private companies.

Kerbrat said adoption will depend on offering new functionality rather than replicating existing brokerage services, with lending, collateralization and continuous trading cited as areas of development.

Kraken, which trails platforms like OKX, Bybit and Coinbase (COIN) in spot trading volumes but remains a major player in the crypto derivatives market. is a U.S.-based crypto exchange where users can buy, sell, and trade digital assets like bitcoin and ether using fiat or crypto. It has expanded into services such as derivatives, staking, and custody, positioning itself as a more full-service trading platform beyond a basic retail app.

Bitcoin Rallies Higher Even As Derivatives Lack Conviction

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Bitcoin Rallies Higher Even As Derivatives Lack Conviction

Key takeaways:

  • While Bitcoin onchain activity and derivatives show a lack of participation from traders, record spot ETF inflows point to strong institutional demand.
  • The absence of leveraged longs may actually fuel further upside as sellers are forced to buy back if Bitcoin edges higher.

Bitcoin (BTC) gained 7% over the past week, breaking above $81,000 for the first time in over three months. Despite the strong price performance, data suggests that Bitcoin derivatives lack optimism from investors and this raises questions on the rally’s sustainability. 

Bitcoin derivatives fail to mirror investors’ joy over $81,000

Macroeconomic and several onchain metrics point to softening demand.

Bitcoin two-month futures basis rate. Source: Laevitas

Bitcoin monthly futures traded at a 1% annualized premium (basis rate) relative to spot markets on Tuesday, landing well below the neutral threshold. Typically, sellers demand a 4% to 8% premium to compensate for the cost of capital. This cautious sentiment took hold in late January, when Bitcoin was trading at $90,000, partly explaining the current lack of enthusiasm.

To confirm if the issue is limited to futures, one should assess the demand balance between put (sell) and call (buy) options. Under neutral conditions, these instruments trade within a -6% to +6% premium relative to each other. When professional traders fear downside risks, the delta skew metric moves above 6%.

Bitcoin 30-day options delta skew (put-call) at Deribit. Source: Laevitas

The Bitcoin delta skew moved closer to the 6% neutral threshold on Tuesday, though it remained slightly bearish. Whales and market makers do not appear particularly worried about an imminent crash, but bulls’ conviction has clearly stagnated. With Brent crude oil prices hovering near $110, persistent inflation concerns are weighing on traders’ expectations for economic growth.

US five-year inflation expectation vs. Euro 10-year government bond yields. Source: TradingView

US inflation expectations neared a 10-year high of 2.5%, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Simultaneously, investors are demanding higher returns to hold Eurozone government bonds. Despite these inflationary pressures, the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index surged to an all-time high on Tuesday, signaling a broader risk-on environment.

Declining Bitcoin onchain activity faces heavy spot ETF accumulation

Bitcoin may have benefited from this increased risk appetite, but weak onchain metrics hints with declining retail demand.

Bitcoin onchain daily volume (USD) vs. number of transfers. Source: Glassnode / Cointelegraph

Daily network transfer volume has plummeted 54% from three months ago, dropping to $4.1 billion. Similarly, the number of transfers is nearing its lowest level in over five years. While Bitcoin’s price action is not strictly dependent on onchain activity, these metrics serve as a proxy for general public interest and adoption.

The temporary pause in Strategy’s (MSTR US) accumulation ahead of its earnings release may have sparked some unwarranted fear. The company, led by Michael Saylor, maintained an aggressive acquisition pace over the previous four weeks. However, analysts expect Strategy to report a quarterly net loss due to its mark-to-market Bitcoin accounting.

Related: Bitcoin turns risk on as stocks hit new highs and miner profits rise: Is $85K BTC next?

Macroeconomic weakness and declining onchain activity negatively impacted Bitcoin derivatives, but the $1.16 billion in net inflows into US-listed Bitcoin spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) between Friday and Monday suggests rising institutional demand.

Ultimately, the lack of demand for leveraged bullish positions in Bitcoin derivatives might serve as a catalyst for further upside. As prices climb, shorts (sellers) may be forced to close their positions at a loss, fueling additional momentum.

This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.

Bitcoin tops $81,000 as Strategy mulls selling BTC to fund dividend obligations

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Bitcoin tops $81,000 as Strategy mulls selling BTC to fund dividend obligations

Bitcoin BTC$81,287.62 zoomed past $81,000 in Asian hours Tuesday, according to CoinDesk market data, up 6.7% on the week and riding the broader risk-on tape that has equities printing records on fading Iran tensions and renewed AI optimism.

Other crypto majors caught the bid. Solana zoomed 3% to $87.35. Dogecoin added another 4% to $0.1158, extending its weekly gain to 14.5% as futures open interest sits at year-highs. XRP, BNB and TRX all printed green on the day.

Ether is the laggard, off 0.3% over 24 hours despite holding a 3.9% weekly gain at $2,376. Spot ETH ETF flows turned negative last week, ending a three-week inflow streak.

Wall Street gauges closed at all-time highs Tuesday after President Donald Trump signaled progress toward a “final agreement” with Iran and announced a pause on Operation Project Freedom for a short period. Brent crude fell 1.7% to about $108 a barrel. The dollar, which had been the haven of choice through the US-Israel war on Iran, weakened against all its G-10 peers.

Asian equities zoomed to an all-time high on Wednesday morning, with the MSCI Asia Pacific index advancing 1.8%. South Korea’s Kospi jumped more than 6% to a record, with Samsung Electronics surging 15% to reach a $1 trillion valuation, the second Asian company ever to clear that mark.

Strong earnings from Advanced Micro Devices and Super Micro Computer added to the AI-trade momentum, with Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.6%.

A key development came as Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor told in the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call that it may sell a portion of its bitcoin holdings to fund dividend payments.

“We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend just to inoculate the market and send the message that we did it,” Saylor said.

The world’s largest corporate bitcoin holder, sitting on 818,334 BTC at an average acquisition cost of $75,537, has not sold any of its position before. The model has always been to buy and hold.

Strategy posted a $12.54 billion Q1 net loss as bitcoin’s slide from October’s $126,000 peak weighed on the company’s mark-to-market accounting. The firm carries roughly $1.5 billion in annual dividend obligations across preferred stock and outstanding debt, with about 18 months of USD reserves to cover them at current run-rates.

MSTR shares dumped over 4% in after-hours trading on the announcement and BTC briefly slipped under $81,000 before recovering.

Saylor framed the move as a feature of the model rather than a break from it.

“You buy bitcoin with credit, you let it appreciate, and then you sell bitcoin to pay the dividend.”

That is a different sentence than every prior Strategy quarter, where the playbook was to issue more debt or equity to fund obligations rather than touch the BTC stack.

FIS Brings Agentic AI to Banking with Anthropic, Starting with Financial Crimes

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FIS Brings Agentic AI to Banking with Anthropic, Starting with Financial Crimes

WHY THIS MATTERS The true significance of this partnership between FIS and Anthropic is not just faster case resolution, but a structural shift in how financial institutions handle regulatory compliance. For too long, anti-money laundering (AML) operations have been defined by manual evidence assembly—a process costing banks tens of billions annually and consuming investigator time that should be spent on threat assessment. This move represents a major step into agentic AI, where autonomous systems handle data collation and initial risk scoring across complex, disconnected core banking systems. It’s a value-first proposition: by cutting investigation time from hours to minutes, banks can immediately refocus human expertise on the most critical high-risk cases. This is crucial as emerging regulations push the industry away from simple volume processing toward a risk-based, intelligence-led approach. Any technology that promises to transform a major cost-center into an engine for efficiency and enhanced risk mitigation is essential reading for every financial services executive.

FIS® (NYSE: FIS), the financial technology company powering nearly 12% of the global economy, announced that it is working with Anthropic to bring agentic AI to banking, beginning with the Financial Crimes AI Agent. The agent will compress anti-money-laundering investigations from hours to minutes, automatically assembling evidence across a bank’s core systems, evaluating activity against known typologies, and surfacing the highest-risk cases for investigator review. BMO and Amalgamated Bank will be among the first institutions to deploy the agent, with broader availability planned for H2 2026. Anthropic’s Applied AI team and forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are embedded with FIS to co-design the Financial Crimes AI Agent and transfer knowledge so FIS can build and scale additional agents independently over time.

This is a strategic initiative, informed by client need, with a clear view toward where banking is headed and a commitment to get there safely and at scale. FIS is combining its decades of proprietary financial data and infrastructure representing billions of transactions, deep regulatory expertise, and the compliance and fraud systems that underpin the global financial system with Anthropic’s frontier AI reasoning, to create a single platform.

“Every bank in the world wants AI that acts, not just assists. The future is about a trusted provider who manages the data, who governs the agents, and who stands between your customers and the AI making decisions about their money. FIS built the architecture that orchestrates this intelligence. Anthropic is a leading AI provider, Claude is the reasoning engine inside, and the Financial Crimes AI Agent is the first proof of what this architecture can deliver for financial institutions that are ready to become the agent-first bank of the future. It’s a new era in banking.” — Stephanie Ferris, CEO and President, FIS

“FIS brings decades of trusted relationships with financial institutions, deep regulatory knowledge, and the transaction data that makes an AI agent useful in practice. That’s why FIS chose Claude, they needed a model that could reason through complex investigations accurately, explain its work, and operate safely inside regulated workflows. We embedded our Applied AI team inside FIS to build the Financial Crimes AI Agent together, so every conclusion the agent reaches links back to its source data, and every decision stays with the investigator.” — Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Financial Services, Anthropic

A New Kind of Strategy

FIS is operating as the foundation, which includes the data platform, the governance layer, the deployment infrastructure, and the client relationships. Through FIS’s data and AI platform — client data will remain within FIS-controlled infrastructure at all times. Anthropic’s Claude models are powering the reasoning capabilities across the strategy. Anthropic’s Applied AI and forward-deployed engineers are co-designing the inaugural Financial Crimes AI agent, while FIS’s product and compliance teams will build additional agents purpose-built for bank-grade operations. This architecture leverages FIS’s Orchestrated Intelligence to deliver AI enterprise-scale outcomes when the data, infrastructure, and governance underneath it are unified.

Why We Started with Financial Crimes

The UN estimates that $2 trillion in illicit funds flows through the global financial system every year. U.S. financial institutions alone spend $35–40 billion annually on AML operations, yet investigators spend the majority of their time manually assembling evidence across disconnected systems before any analysis can begin. Emerging U.S. regulation is now pushing institutions to move beyond this model, shifting resources toward the highest-risk threats.

The Financial Crimes AI Agent will change that. At case open, the agent will assemble the complete evidence package across a bank’s core systems automatically via secure connections, whether FIS-run or bank-owned, and evaluate activity against known typologies. Investigators will remain in control of every decision, freed to direct their expertise toward the cases that matter most.

The agent will be evaluated on:

  • Reducing cost per case, by eliminating the manual evidence gathering that consumes the majority of investigator time today.
  • Reducing low-value manual work, ensuring investigators spend their time on critical decisions.
  • Cutting case review time, freeing investigators to direct their expertise toward the cases that matter most.

BMO and Amalgamated Bank will be among the first in development, with broader availability to FIS financial institution clients planned for H2 2026.

The Data Foundation That Makes This Work

For most institutions, financial crime data sits locked in disconnected systems, impossible to act on at the speed investigations demand. FIS sits at the center of it. As the system of record for transactions, payments, deposits, credit and customer activity, FIS unifies a bank’s data into a single, governed environment delivering the analytics and AI capabilities that would otherwise require years and significant investment to build independently.

FIS serves as the system of record for transactions, payments, deposits, credit, and customer activity across thousands of financial institutions — giving the Financial Crimes AI Agent native access to the data investigators need without new integrations or outside vendor exposure. For institutions running non-FIS core systems, the agent connects via open integration standards. In all cases, the governance, evaluation, and audit layer remains within FIS-controlled infrastructure, so regardless of where the source data lives, every agent conclusion is traceable and every decision is recorded within the platform clients already trust.

A Growing Agent Roadmap

Financial crimes is the first proof point. FIS is building a roadmap of curated agents on the same platform, each purpose-built for a specific banking pain point, each drawing on FIS’s unified data and regulatory infrastructure, each powered by Claude.

The roadmap ahead spans credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention, which will be available to FIS financial institution clients through a single, governed platform.

FF NEWS TAKE: This announcement is a crucial signal that agentic AI has definitively arrived in the highest-stakes areas of finance, setting a new industry standard. The combination of FIS’s central data infrastructure and Anthropic’s advanced reasoning engine moves the needle significantly, offering a bank-grade compliance solution with traceable decisions. The immediate focus should shift from the initial Financial Crimes Agent to the subsequent roadmap: we must watch how quickly purpose-built agents for critical areas like credit decisioning and consumer fraud prevention are rolled out, and whether they successfully maintain this robust governance layer at scale.

North Korea terror victims escalate fight to seize $71 million from Aave hack

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North Korea terror victims escalate fight to seize $71 million from Aave hack

Lawyers seeking to seize $71 million in frozen ether for victims of North Korean terrorism changed their legal strategy Tuesday, arguing in a new court filing that the April 18 rsETH exploit was not theft but fraud, directly countering Aave’s attempt to void a restraining notice blocking the release of the assets.

In a 30-page opposition brief filed in the Southern District of New York, a lawyer representing the North Korean terror victims argues the exploit was not a smash-and-grab theft but a fraudulent lending transaction, and that under longstanding U.S. law, fraudsters who acquire property through deception can obtain legal title to it, even if that ownership is later reversible.

“What actually happened is that North Korea borrowed assets from users of the ‘Aave Protocol’ and did not pay it back, and when the ‘Aave Protocol’ sought to liquidate North Korea’s collateral, the ‘Aave Protocol’ unhappily discovered that the collateral was worthless,” the new filing reads.

“The law is crystal clear that a fraud victim passes title, not merely possession, to a fraudster… Charles Ponzi obtained, through his now-eponymous scheme, ‘defeasible title’ to his victims’ cash,” it continues.

The dispute traces to a cross-chain bridge exploit last month that drained roughly $230 million from Aave, the largest decentralized lending protocol by total value locked.

An attacker, widely attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group by forensics firms including Chainalysis and TRM Labs, minted unbacked rsETH tokens, used them as collateral on Aave’s lending markets, and borrowed real ether against the worthless deposits.

Developers tied to the Arbitrum blockchain later intercepted about $71 million before it could be cashed out.

The filing also escalates the dispute beyond New York property law, invoking the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA), a post-9/11 federal law that allows people who win court judgments against state sponsors of terrorism to collect those judgments from any U.S.-held property belonging to the country in question.

If the court accepts that theory, Aave’s earlier arguments about New York property law may matter less.

The filing also asks whether Aave has legal standing to challenge the freeze at all, citing the company’s own terms of service, which state that it does not have “possession, custody or control” over user assets, a core aspect of decentralized finance.

Lawyers also pointed out in the filing that the affected users may not need the frozen ether at all. DeFi United, an industry-led recovery fund Aave itself is part of, has raised $327.95 million as of Tuesday morning — more than four times the disputed $71 million.

A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, May 6, in a Manhattan federal court.

XRP above $1.42 as traders watch 2025 breakout pattern that led to 66% rally

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XRP above $1.42 as traders watch 2025 breakout pattern that led to 66% rally

XRP is back above $1.42, and traders are starting to focus on a chart setup that sent XRP up 66% in less than two weeks when it appeared in 2025.

News Background

• Analysts flagged a repeating XRP chart fractal from 2025, when a breakout from a multi-week bull flag triggered a rally toward all-time highs above $3.

• A bull flag is a pattern where price jumps sharply, then moves sideways or slightly lower for a while before potentially breaking higher again. Traders usually see it as a pause in momentum rather than a full reversal.

• Current price action again shows XRP breaking out of a bull flag while the 20-day and 50-day moving averages approach a bullish crossover.

• Some traders now view holding above $1.40 as critical, with the level acting as both psychological support and the upper boundary of the recent flag structure.

Price Action Summary

• XRP climbed from $1.4011 to $1.4184, extending its weekly gain to nearly 9%.
• A 74.6M volume spike at 13:00 pushed price to $1.4207 before momentum cooled into consolidation.
• The token spent the final hours stabilizing between $1.417-$1.420 after repeated tests of the $1.422 resistance zone.

Technical Analysis

• XRP continues building higher lows, keeping short-term bullish structure intact above $1.40.
• The repeated tests near $1.42 matter because resistance weakens each time sellers fail to force a deeper rejection.
• Liquidity on Binance has fallen to its lowest level since 2020, which historically creates conditions for outsized moves once ranges finally break.
• The broader setup resembles the 2025 breakout structure where XRP compressed for weeks before accelerating sharply higher.

What traders should watch

• $1.42 remains the key breakout level. A clean move above it opens the path toward $1.47-$1.50.
• Holding above $1.40 is equally important because failed breakouts often turn into fast reversals once momentum fades.
• If the range finally resolves lower, $1.34-$1.37 becomes the first major support zone traders watch.

Perú, Chile y Argentina ingresan en una nueva fase de crecimiento impulsada por los pagos en tiempo real, según un informe de ACI

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Perú, Chile y Argentina ingresan en una nueva fase de crecimiento impulsada por los pagos en tiempo real, según un informe de ACI

Brasil y Colombia han sentado parámetros de referencia en cuanto a la modernización de los pagos en tiempo real y ofrecen una hoja de ruta de eficacia demostrada para Chile, Perú y Argentina

ACI Worldwide se suma a otros líderes del sector, de la tecnología financiera y de las políticas en el Foro Fintech de Chile en mayo para promover el debate sobre los pagos en tiempo real

Perú, Chile y Argentina están ingresando en una etapa crucial de su proceso de modernización de los pagos en tiempo real y al adoptarlos, propiciaría el crecimiento económico y la inclusión financiera en toda la región, según el informe Real-Time Payments: Economic Impact and Financial Inclusion (Pagos en tiempo real: impacto económico e inclusión financiera). Este estudio fue encargado por ACI Worldwide y realizado por el Cebr (Centre for Economics and Business Research), un reconocido centro de estudios económicos.*

Se estima que para 2028, los pagos en tiempo real aportarán miles de millones de dólares en producto bruto interno (PBI) formal en estos tres mercados y ampliarán el acceso a los servicios financieros para millones de personas que históricamente quedaban excluidas del sistema financiero, según este estudio.

  • Argentina: Se calcula que los pagos en tiempo real generarán unos 19.300 millones de dólares adicionales en el PBI para 2028. Asimismo, se espera que la expansión continua de las redes de pagos en tiempo real les permita a 1,1 millones de personas incorporarse al sistema financiero formal.
  • Perú: Los pagos en tiempo real generarían 376 millones de dólares en PBI adicional e incorporarían a 1,4 millones de personas al sistema bancario.
  • Chile: Según las proyecciones, los pagos en tiempo real podrían generar 740 millones de dólares en PBI formal adicional y ampliar el acceso financiero a más de 83.000 personas.

Brasil y Colombia: Referentes regionales consolidados

Las ganancias previstas en Perú, Chile y Argentina se sustentan en un precedente regional establecido con gran contundencia por Brasil y Colombia, donde los pagos en tiempo real ya se han convertido en una infraestructura económica esencial.

Según lo previsto para 2028, el ecosistema Pix de Brasil aportaría 49.900 millones de dólares en PBI formal adicional, lo que demuestra la potencia económica que tienen la escala y el uso cotidiano.

Colombia se ha convertido en un referente regional en materia de pagos en tiempo real tras la implementación de Bre-B y su adopción acelerada en todo el ecosistema financiero, de modo que para 2028 se prevé que los pagos en tiempo real aporten 282 millones de dólares adicionales al PBI del país, aunque su impacto más relevante se producirá en materia de inclusión.

Según lo previsto, se integrarían al sistema bancario colombiano 5,1 millones de personas que antes estaban excluidas del sistema financiero, lo que supone la mayor expansión de la inclusión financiera en América Latina. La velocidad y la escala de la implementación de Bre-B demuestran cómo una infraestructura de pagos en tiempo real e interoperable puede acelerar el acceso a los servicios financieros, consolidando a Colombia como un punto de referencia para los mercados de toda la región que buscan una modernización inclusiva de los pagos.

“Cada mercado está ingresando en esta nueva fase desde un punto de partida distinto”, subrayó Mauricio Fernández, responsable de pagos en tiempo real para Latinoamérica de ACI Worldwide. “En Perú, el impulso del banco central a los pagos en tiempo real y la interoperabilidad podría redefinir el ecosistema de pagos y ampliar significativamente la inclusión financiera. En Chile, la atención se centra en ampliar la adopción, yendo más allá de los pagos entre particulares para abarcar los pagos a comerciantes y las transacciones cotidianas. En Argentina, las reformas normativas y el crecimiento acelerado de las fintech están motorizando la innovación y la competencia, lo que contribuye a ampliar el acceso a los servicios financieros y a sostener el crecimiento económico”.

Citi exec says fragmented crypto systems risk repeating old banking problems

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Citi exec says fragmented crypto systems risk repeating old banking problems

Miami Beach, FL — Tokenized money will fail to deliver on its promise if it remains siloed within individual banks, according to Ryan Rugg, Citigroup’s head of digital assets for treasury and trade solutions.

Speaking at Consensus in Miami, Rugg said large corporate clients are not looking for single-bank solutions but systems that work seamlessly across financial institutions. “No one wants just a Citi token,” she said. “They want that multi-bank aspect of it.”

The comment reflects a core challenge in the push to bring blockchain-based payments into mainstream finance. While banks have begun issuing tokenized deposits and building internal platforms, many of those systems operate within closed networks.

For global companies, that approach falls short. Rugg said Citi’s clients often manage “hundreds, if not thousands of bank accounts across multiple banks globally,” creating complexity in moving money for payroll, suppliers and investments.

Those clients are increasingly asking for real-time capabilities. In a survey Citi conducted several years ago, Rugg said the response was “basically unanimous” that faster, always-on payments were a top priority.

Blockchain technology offers one path to that goal, but only if systems can connect. Citi has built its own tokenized platform and linked it to its broader banking network, including a 24/7 U.S. dollar clearing system with more than 300 banks. Still, Rugg emphasized that internal upgrades alone are not enough.

“This is another tool in the toolkit,” she said, adding that banks must also modernize traditional infrastructure and connect it with digital systems.

The broader industry faces fragmentation. A growing number of banks, fintech firms and crypto projects are building separate networks, often using different standards. That risks recreating the same inefficiencies blockchain aims to fix.

Rugg argued that shared infrastructure — built “for the industry, by the industry” — will be key to scaling tokenized finance, citing models such as Swift’s global messaging network.

At the same time, regulation remains a constraint. Large banks require clear legal frameworks before rolling out new products. “Unless it is 100% permissible, we are not going to do that,” Rugg said.

Kelp DAO Accuses LayerZero of Deflecting Blame for $300M Bridge Hack

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Kelp DAO Accuses LayerZero of Deflecting Blame for $300M Bridge Hack

The liquid restaking protocol argues that the 1-of-1 verifier setup at the center of the April 18 exploit was LayerZero’s own documented default.

Kelp DAO on Tuesday published a detailed rebuttal to LayerZero’s account of the April 18 rsETH bridge exploit, confirming that it will migrate rsETH from the LayerZero OFT standard to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard and accusing the cross-chain messaging firm of “blaming users for an issue that was caused by their own infrastructure failure.”

The statement, titled “Setting the Record Straight,” disputes nearly every claim in LayerZero’s post-mortem, which attributed the $300 million theft to Kelp’s choice of a 1-of-1 DVN configuration. Kelp argues that setup was the configuration LayerZero itself shipped as the default, approved in private communications with the LayerZero team, and used by hundreds of other applications across the ecosystem.

Kelp’s central argument is that the configuration LayerZero is now treating as a fringe choice was, in practice, the platform’s standard. The protocol points to public Dune data showing roughly 47% of LayerZero’s 2,665 active OApp contracts ran a 1-1 DVN security floor at the time of the exploit, with another 45% on 2-2 and only about 5% using 3-3 or higher.

In its post, Kelp published Telegram screenshots showing an alleged LayerZero Labs team member explicitly approving Kelp’s 1-1 configuration during the L2 expansion, alongside separate exchanges in which LayerZero assured the team its DVN was run with full monitoring and alerting.

Infrastructure Breach

Kelp’s second major argument is that the exploit originated inside LayerZero’s trust boundary. Citing reports from Seal911 and Yearn Finance core developer banteg, the protocol notes that the attackers, linked with high confidence to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, fraudulently triggered an attestation from the LayerZero Labs DVN by compromising RPC nodes that LayerZero itself operated.

Kelp argues LayerZero’s own postmortem confirms this when it refers to “our DVN” and “our least-privilege principles,” and pushes back on the framing of the event as a contained “RPC-spoofing attack.”

The team also notes that two additional forged transactions totaling more than $100 million were signed and processed by the LayerZero Labs DVN before being blocked when Kelp paused its contracts, and that LayerZero’s monitoring did not catch the compromise.

Open Questions

Kelp’s post lists four questions it wants LayerZero to answer publicly: how the RPC endpoint lists were accessed, how LayerZero’s documented defaults reconcile with the volume of 1-1 configurations across the ecosystem, why monitoring failed to detect the infrastructure compromise, and the dwell time of the compromised nodes before the forged message was signed.

Migration to Chainlink

Alongside the rebuttal, Kelp confirmed that rsETH will move to Chainlink’s CCIP and the CCT standard across all supported chains, with operational details being finalized by the engineering team. The Defi United coalition is separately working to restore the backing of rsETH and recover stolen tokens still held in attacker-controlled positions on Aave and Compound.

LayerZero has not yet responded publicly to Kelp’s rebuttal.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Crypto’s barbell; speculation and stablecoin payments won users, Tempo’s Romero says

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Crypto’s barbell; speculation and stablecoin payments won users, Tempo’s Romero says

Miami Beach, FL — After years of experimentation, crypto today is boiling down to two core uses: trading and payments.

Speaking at a fireside chat at Consensus 2026 in Miami, Tempo’s go-to-market lead, Dan Romero, said the industry is settling into a “barbell” shape, with speculative trading like Hyperliquid’s marketplace on one end and stablecoin-based payments gaining traction on the other.

“The things that have worked over the last five years are speculation and stablecoins,” he said. “In the middle, it’s a bit of a wasteland,” he added, describing a slew of projects that have struggled to find product-market fit despite years of development and funding.

Romero is speaking from experience. Before joining Tempo, he was the co-founder of crypto social app Farcaster, which struggled to gain traction despite hefty venture capital checks and years of hype.

Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain backed by Stripe and Paradigm, is positioning itself firmly on the payments side of that divide. Built as a purpose-specific layer-1 blockchain, the network focuses on enterprise needs like compliance and transaction control — features often missing from public blockchains.

For example, companies can block interactions with certain wallet addresses, a function aimed at reducing regulatory risk, Romero said.

That design reflects a broader shift in how large firms approach crypto. Rather than experimenting with tokens, many are adopting stablecoins as backend infrastructure. “It’s plumbing,” the executive said. “But enterprises like plumbing if it’s better, faster, cheaper.”

Stablecoins are already gaining ground in areas like remittances. One example cited was cross-border payments between the U.S. and Mexico, where crypto rails now account for a growing share of flows.

The next wave could come from internet-native businesses. Startups, especially those built around AI agents, are likely to default to stablecoins as the easiest way to move money globally, he said — much like Stripe simplified online payments more than a decade ago.

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