Evercrest Technologies, the company behind KelpDAO, has filed a civil claim against LayerZero entities and co-founder Bryan Pellegrino.
\nThe lawsuit concerns the April exploit that drained 116,500 rsETH, worth about $292 million at the time.
\nKelpDAO alleges LayerZero reviewed and endorsed the bridge configuration later blamed for the attack; those claims have not been proven in court.<\/p>\n
The company behind KelpDAO has taken its dispute with LayerZero into court, filing a civil claim over the April bridge exploit that cost the restaking protocol roughly $292 million.<\/p>\n
Evercrest Technologies filed the case in the Supreme Court of British Columbia against LayerZero Labs Ltd., LayerZero Labs Canada Inc. and co-founder Bryan Pellegrino.<\/p>\n
The allegations include negligence, negligent misrepresentation and defamation.<\/p>\n
The underlying exploit involved 116,500 rsETH moved through a bridge connecting KelpDAO infrastructure with Unichain.<\/p>\n
At the time of the attack, the assets were worth approximately $292 million.<\/p>\n
A major point of disagreement since then has been the bridge\u2019s security configuration.<\/p>\n
KelpDAO alleges LayerZero reviewed and endorsed a setup using a single Decentralized Verifier Network, or DVN, rather than warning the project that the configuration created a dangerous single point of failure.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit further alleges that LayerZero later blamed KelpDAO for using that design.<\/p>\n
Those are allegations from Evercrest\u2019s court filing.<\/p>\n
LayerZero has not been found liable, and the filing does not establish that its account of the events is correct.<\/p>\n
That distinction is especially important in a dispute where the technical responsibility for a bridge failure is itself part of the case.<\/p>\n
Cross-chain security failures have typically been treated as technical incidents.<\/p>\n
A bridge gets exploited, investigators trace the funds, developers patch the vulnerability and protocols argue over who configured what.<\/p>\n
The KelpDAO case could push that discussion into a different arena.<\/p>\n
If infrastructure providers review or recommend security configurations used by third-party applications, courts may eventually have to decide what responsibility comes with that advice.<\/p>\n
That has implications well beyond KelpDAO and LayerZero.<\/p>\n
Interoperability systems depend on protocols integrating software and trust assumptions they did not design entirely themselves.<\/p>\n
When hundreds of millions of dollars move through those systems, disagreements about who understood the risk can quickly become more than engineering disputes.<\/p>\n
For now, the lawsuit marks the beginning of that process rather than the conclusion.<\/p>\n
The exploit happened in April.<\/p>\n
The fight over who bears responsibility for it is only now moving into court.<\/p>\n