Autor Cointelegraph By Martin Young

Crypto exchange Kraken announced Thursday that it had changed its cross-chain provider from LayerZero to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, joining a number of protocols that have made the move following the Kelp DAO exploit in April.Kraken said it is deprecating its existing cross-chain provider and migrating to Chainlink CCIP as its exclusive cross-chain infrastructure to secure Kraken Wrapped Bitcoin (kBTC) and all future wrapped tokens.The company added that it chose Chainlink CCIP because it “offers enterprise-grade infrastructure with strict security and risk management requirements.” These include certifications, secure-by-default design, 16 independent nodes and native rate limits.LayerZero has been under scrutiny since the Kelp DAO exploit in April, in which about $292 million in liquid restaking tokens were stolen by actors suspected to be linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.LayerZero issued an “overdue apology” on May 9, saying that it had done a “terrible job on comms over the past three weeks.”It admitted that its internal RPCs (remote procedure calls) were attacked and had their “source of truth poisoned” while its external RPC providers were simultaneously hit with a denial of service attack, but blamed Kelp’s configuration as a direct consequence of their single-DVN (Decentralized Verifier Network) setup.LayerZero confirmed that no other application had been affected, and more than $9 billion in bridged assets have been moved using the protocol since April 19.Other protocols migrate away from LayerZeroKraken is not alone in making the switch. Kelp DAO stated that it is also in the process of migrating to Chainlink’s CCIP, and that it had burned the hacker’s 117,132 rsETH as part of the recovery process this week. Related: Kelp DAO eyes reopening withdrawals after rsETH burnSolv Protocol announced on May 7 that it was migrating from LayerZero to CCIP as its official cross-chain infrastructure for $700 million in tokenized Bitcoin.Meanwhile, onchain reinsurance protocol Re announced on May 8 that it was migrating its $475 million in total value locked from LayerZero to the Chainlink protocol. More than $3 billion in TVL has been migrated to CCIP since the Kelp hack, while numerous protocols have suspended bridging using LayerZero, according to MEXC.The world’s largest Ethereum liquid staking protocol, Lido, also uses CCIP. “Chainlink’s defense-in-depth model acts as the definitive standard for cross-chain interoperability,” it explained in a blog post on Thursday. CCIP and LayerZero comparison. Source: Lido No reaction in token pricesThere was no reaction in prices for Chainlink’s native token, LINK, which remains at a bear market low of around $10, down 80% from its 2021 peak. However, LayerZero’s native token ZRO has declined over 30% since the April hack and is down more than 80% from its 2024 all-time high, according to CoinGecko. Cointelegraph reached out to LayerZero for comment but did not receive an immediate response. Magazine: eToro founder timed Bitcoin top perfectly due to belief in 4 year cycles

Crypto company Gemini reported a 42% year-over-year increase in revenue in Q1 2026 as it continued its growth from a pure crypto exchange to a financial services company.Total revenue for the Winklevoss twins’ company grew 42% year over year to $50.3 million in the first quarter, while transaction revenue remained stable at $24 million, the company reported Thursday.However, its crypto exchange revenue decreased 27% year-over-year to $17.2 million, “reflecting lower spot trading activity and a moderation in crypto market volumes,” while total trading volume declined to $6.3 billion from $13.5 billion in Q1 2025. The biggest increase was in credit card revenue, which surged nearly 300% to $14.7 million, driven by significant growth in the Gemini Credit Card user base, the company said. The expansion from crypto into broader financial services began in early 2021, when the company announced consumer finance products such as credit cards. Five years later, services and interest income, driven heavily by credit cards, made up almost half of total revenue, showing how pivotal the expansion has become. “As Gemini continues to evolve, we expect that the momentum we have built in diversifying our revenue will only accelerate,” said Gemini president Cameron Winklevoss. Gemini’s revenue increased, but so did operating expenses. Source: GeminiOther crypto exchanges have been eyeing business outside of digital assets, Coinbase has aggressively expanded into stock and ETF trading in a goal to become an “everything exchange,” while Kraken has made recent acquisitions enabling it to expand into regulated derivatives markets. Total operating expenses increased  Alongside revenue growth, Gemini also reported a 73% increase in total operating expenses to $144.5 million in the quarter. This was driven primarily by “compensation, marketing and credit card-related costs associated with the significant business expansion,” the company said. Gemini reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of just under $60 million. Related: Gemini sued over post-IPO strategy shift, declining stock priceGemini also disclosed Thursday that it closed a $100 million strategic investment from Winklevoss Capital in exchange for 7.1 million shares of common stock, with the investment funded in Bitcoin.Path to becoming a full-stack, end-to-end marketplaceIn April, the company received a Derivatives Clearing Organization license from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, making Gemini one of only a handful of crypto-native platforms in the country to hold both a Designated Contract Market and a DCO license in-house.“This all represents the next step towards Gemini becoming a full-stack, end-to-end marketplace for crypto trading, predictions, futures, options, and more,” the firm stated. Gemini’s stock (GEMI) gained 6.9% on Thursday to reach $4.92 in after-hours trading; however, it remains down 47% year-to-date, according to Google Finance. Last week, Coinbase reported $1.41 billion in total Q1 revenue, down 31% year over year, but it posted a net loss of $394 million. It is much larger than Gemini and also saw strong diversification into derivatives, prediction markets, and stablecoins, which helped offset the decline. Magazine: eToro founder timed Bitcoin top perfectly due to belief in 4 year cycles

Decentralized finance mobile “superapp” Legend has announced it is winding down after about two years of operation, adding to a string of crypto apps deciding to shut down this year. Legend was a DeFi aggregator that aimed to bring DeFi to its users rather than forcing them to sign into multiple different wallets or applications to use their crypto. “We believed the right interface could put DeFi’s most powerful primitives in front of mainstream users.” Legend co-founder Jayson Hobby said on Tuesday. However, despite the product finding an audience, it didn’t “grow to the scale the company needed to be sustainable long-term,” said Hobby. “Closing is the right call for our team and our investors.”Over 20 DeFi, NFT and GameFi protocols have announced they are shutting down this year, including ZeroLend, which said in February that it planned to shut down after three years of operations, citing an unsustainable business model.Closure notice on the Legend website. Source: Legend.xyzSolana DeFi aggregator Step Finance said it was closing down in February after a $40 million treasury wallet breach in January, and DeFi derivatives protocol Polynomial also ceased operations in February. Balancer Labs, the team behind the DeFi protocol Balancer, shuttered in March after mounting financial pressure following a $116 million hack in November.Meanwhile, Seamless Protocol, a DeFi lending protocol on Base, said it was winding down in April, blaming volatile market conditions.Users don’t care whether product is onchain or notLegend is a non-custodial, mobile-first DeFi aggregator launched around late 2024 by former Compound Finance executives, including CEO Hobby. It is used for earning, trading, borrowing and swapping assets like stablecoins and Ether via integrations with other DeFi protocols such as Aave, Compound and Uniswap. It aimed to bring DeFi to its users rather than forcing them to sign into multiple different wallets or applications to use their crypto. It announced its first funding round, raising $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures, in February 2025. Related: Kelp DAO eyes unpausing withdrawals after attackers’ rsETH on Arbitrum is burnedHowever, Hobby said that mainstream users don’t care if a product is onchain or not. “They want outcomes,” he said. “Better yield, faster payments, more control over their money.”“The product that wins isn’t the one that explains crypto better, it’s the one that hides it completely. The benefits are felt, not explained.”Legend has not disclosed active user counts or total value locked figures, as it operates as an aggregator, but the TVL for the broader DeFi ecosystem has tanked 50% since October in the wider crypto bear market. The Legend app will keep running normally for the next 60 days and will go offline on July 12, said Hobby.Magazine: DeFi’s billion-dollar secret: The insiders responsible for hacks 

Ethereum liquid restaking platform Kelp and decentralized lending protocol Aave have completed a series of steps to restore rsETH backing, including burning the exploiter’s rsETH tokens.Kelp DAO detailed a post-exploit recovery for its liquid staking token rsETH on Tuesday, confirming that the hacker’s tokens were burned on the layer-2 Arbitrum network.The 117,132 rsETH, currently worth about $278 million, will be refilled progressively over two weeks from Aave Recovery Guardian, a multisignature wallet controlled by the DeFi United recovery group and Kelp’s own recovery safe into the LayerZero OFT adapter, a smart contract that handles locking, minting, burning and releasing rsETH during cross-chain transfers.Kelp DAO confirmed that rsETH on mainnet and layer-2 networks, which has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion, remains fully backed at all times.The move to recover the liquid staking tokens will bring users impacted by one of this year’s largest DeFi exploits one step closer to recovery. Kelp was hacked in April when attackers widely attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group exploited its rsETH adapter bridge contract, the software that manages the platform’s liquid restaking token, and drained about $293 million. Blockchain security firm OpenZeppelin reported at the time that no smart contract bug had been publicly identified, adding that “the system failed operationally,” and this is a category of risk the DeFi industry has “consistently underweighted.”Tracking the exploited funds. Source: CyversWithdrawals will resume within 24 hoursKelp said it will unpause withdrawals, “tentatively within 24 hours,” after the first tranche is returned to the smart contract. All rsETH operations, including deposits, redemptions, bridging and claims, will resume as usual after the contracts are reactivated.The protocol has also completed a “security hardening pass,” and bridging security now requires four independent attestors and 64 block confirmations, while it has deprecated some layer-2 routes.Related: At least a dozen crypto entities attacked since Drift Protocol hackIt is also in the process of migrating to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) for “further strengthened cross-chain bridging.”Derivatives traders undeterred by DeFi hacks Kelp is a prominent liquid restaking protocol on Ethereum, primarily built on top of EigenLayer, where users deposit ETH or other supported liquid staking tokens for additional yields. The protocol’s total value locked hit an all-time high of just over $2 billion in September 2025 but has since declined by about 26% to $1.55 billion, according to DeFiLlama.Cointelegraph reported this week that metrics showed ETH derivatives traders were holding steady and haven’t flipped bearish despite the recent DeFi exploits.However, spot prices are down around 1% on the day, with Ether falling to a 12-day low of $2,260 in late trading on Tuesday. Magazine: DeFi’s billion-dollar secret: The insiders responsible for hacks 

The Ethereum Foundation has reached several progress milestones on the next Ethereum upgrade called “Glamsterdam” and has named three new leads for its Protocol team.The Ethereum Foundation said in a blog post on Monday that it had achieved a “credible post-Glamsterdam target,” establishing a 200 million gas limit floor, giving the network a major post-upgrade speed boost from its current gas limit of around 60 million.“The immediate focus is shipping Glamsterdam,” the Ethereum Foundation said, which had originally scheduled the upgrade for June, but is now likely to be sometime in the third quarter of 2026.Glamsterdam focuses on scaling the layer-1 chain by reorganizing how the network processes transactions and manages its growing database, “fundamentally updating how Ethereum creates and verifies blocks,” according to the Ethereum website. The Ethereum Foundation is also continuing preparations for Hegotà, the next major upgrade, and advancing the Strawmap, its quantum-ready roadmap.“Glamsterdam devnets are now live, and scoping for Hegotà is well underway,” it stated during an interop event in Svalbard, Norway. Finalizing ePBS and smarter data storageThe EF also confirmed the stabilization of enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), a system that allows validators to outsource their block-building duties to a set of specialized builders.The new enshrined version builds this separation directly into Ethereum’s rules with less reliance on outside relays, giving the network more time to handle bigger blocks safely.Related: AI ‘vibe coding’ could put Ethereum roadmap ahead of schedule: Vitalik ButerinEIP-8037 has also been finalized, which enables smarter pricing for storing data. The proposal increases the cost of state creation operations, avoiding excessive state growth under increased block gas limits. Glamsterdam is the first upgrade on Ethereum’s long-term roadmap. Source: Strawmap.orgChanges in EF Protocol leadership The Foundation also announced the “start of a leadership transition” for the Ethereum Foundation Protocol cluster with Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik as the new leads. Ethereum developers Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko are moving on from the Foundation, while Alex Stokes will be on sabbatical, it said.“There’s a new chapter starting for the Protocol cluster. We’re welcoming new leads and coordinators, and continuing our work toward Glamsterdam, Hegotà, and the Strawmap,” said Corcoran on X on Monday. “Making Ethereum’s unique features more available to users today is on my mind; so is participating in the plurality of ways that Ethereum gets built,” said Monnot.Magazine: Strategy reveals why they would sell BTC, Trump Media posts loss: Hodler’s Digest