Bitcoin-centric DeFi platform Solv Protocol announced that it will migrate to Chainlink from LayerZero, following a major security incident involving the latter.
In a Thursday post, Solv Protocol wrote it will phase out LayerZero's bridging support for SolvBTC and xSolvBTC with Corn, Berachain, Rootstock, and TAC. Instead, Solv designated Chainlink's CCIP as its official cross-chain infrastructure solution for over $700 million in assets.
"In light of recent industry events, Solv reviewed its existing bridges and found that CCIP provided the strongest security assurances through its secure-by-default architecture, native risk controls, and proactive monitoring," the team wrote in the post.
Solv added that CCIP is widely considered the "gold standard" for decentralized interoperability and is officially recognized by the White House as a critical digital asset infrastructure.
Kelp DAO incident
Solv's migration follows the $292 million exploit on LayerZero-powered Kelp DAO last month. The attacker, suspected to be North Korea's Lazarus Group, exploited a single-verifier configuration of an Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) bridge to drain 116,500 rsETH from Kelp DAO.
While the exploit's impact led to significant bad debt on the Aave protocol, LayerZero and Kelp shifted blame onto one another. LayerZero criticized Kelp DAO's 1-of-1 decentralized verifier network (DVN) setup, which it said it warned against.
In rebuttal, Kelp DAO said that such a setup was LayerZero's default onboarding recommendation, pointing out that 47% of LayerZero apps use the single-verifier setup. Earlier this week, Kelp announced that it will drop LayerZero as its cross-chain infrastructure provider in favor of Chainlink.
Solv did not mention Kelp's exploit or the subsequent migration in its latest post, but explained its need to relocate to a platform it deemed more secure.
"Cross-chain bridges remain one of the most sensitive and high-risk areas in DeFi, with insecure bridges bringing systemic risk to the entire industry," Solv wrote. "Recurring industry-wide security incidents have made this explicitly clear and reinforced the standard that all projects require the interoperability solution with the most robust security and decentralization."
Solv itself was exploited in March this year, where around $2.7 million was drained from one of its Bitcoin Reserve Offerings (BRO) token vaults.