Chainlink · North Korea · Lombard Finance · Decrypt
Months After the $292 million Kelp Hack, Chainlink Lets Institutions Add Their Own Bridge Checks
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Chainlink today launched CCIP 2.0, the newest version of its cross-chain plumbing—the software layer banks and crypto projects increasingly use to move tokenized money, like stablecoins, wrapped Bitcoin, and tokenized funds, between blockchains without building a bridge from scratch.
Key facts
- The timing traces back to April, when hackers linked to North Korea's Lazarus Group drained about $292 million from Kelp DAO, a protocol that let users stake Ethereum and move the token across chains
- CCIP 2.0's answer to that single-point-of-failure problem is a new feature called the Cross-Chain Verifier, or CCV
- Chainlink says CCIP now secures more than $84 billion in cross-chain token value, a figure it reports itself
- Kelp itself moved to Chainlink, and so did Kraken, which shifted its wrapped Bitcoin token, and Lombard Finance, which moved over $1 billion in Bitcoin-linked assets
Summary
Chainlink launched CCIP 2.0 on Monday, letting institutions operate their own custom verifiers instead of depending solely on Chainlink's default network. The upgrade lands five months after LayerZero-linked Kelp DAO lost $292 million to hackers tied to North Korea, a hack that pushed Kraken and Lombard to Chainlink. Chainlink's own docs confirm "the Risk Management Network's automated offchain role is no longer active in current CCIP deployments," ending its job as an independent second check on transfers. That plumbing exists because blockchains don't talk to each other.