ABOUT THIS EPISODE
The $300M KelpDAO exploit became a watershed moment for DeFi, and the Arbitrum Security Council voted froze $70M worth of stolen funds. Is this a slippery slope or learning from history?
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The largest DeFi hack of 2026 starts with an RPC node. Not a smart contract bug. Not a stolen key. A spoofed node and a forged transaction. And North Korea drained $300 million from Kelp DAO through LayerZero’s bridge in a single block. Then the attacker went to Aave, borrowed against assets that didn’t exist, and created a bad debt crisis that locked Kain out of his own position.
That was Friday. By Sunday, North Korea had started laundering. By Tuesday, Arbitrum’s security council had done something no L2 has ever done: frozen $70 million of funds had stolen by upgrading a bridge contract mid-hack. Kain Warwick, Taylor Monahan, and Luca Netz, with guest Odysseas Lamtzidis, take apart every layer: the DVN architecture flaw, the Aave contagion, the circuit breaker debate, and why the ‘code is law’ era may have just quietly ended.
Hosts:
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Kain Warwick, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix
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Taylor Monahan, Security Expert
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Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins
Guest:
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Odysseas Lamtzidis, Founder & CEO of Phylax
Timestamps 🚀 0:00 Introduction 🌉 10:50 How the Kelp DAO hack drained $300M from LayerZero’s DVN 🔍 14:40 Why Taylor says the RPC spoof is scarier than a key compromise 💸 17:08 How the attacker looped rsETH in Aave to amplify the damage ⚖️ 27:08 Why Odysseas thinks bridges carry systemic risk most teams ignore 🔒 42:39 Whether circuit breakers could have stopped the Aave contagion 🏛️ 1:03:09 What Arbitrum’s security council actually did to freeze DPRK funds 🌊 1:13:06 Why Kain calls this a watershed moment for DeFi governance 🎭 1:18:02 How DPRK uses property rights arguments to unfreeze stolen funds 🧠 1:20:42 What Odysseas recommends for teams building DeFi protocols today
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