Total value locked across DeFi categories has continued to decline, down roughly 14% since mid-April, falling from approximately $172 billion to $148 billion.
The inflection point coincides with the KelpDAO bridge exploit on April 18, which has since cast a longer shadow over broader DeFi sentiment than the incident alone might suggest.
On April 18, attackers reportedly linked to North Korea's Lazarus Group exploited KelpDAO's LayerZero bridge, stealing approximately $292 million (116,500 rsETH) through a compromise of off-chain infrastructure rather than a smart contract vulnerability.
The attack manipulated internal RPC nodes and overwhelmed external validators to feed false data into a single-point-of-failure verification setup, tricking the destination chain into releasing funds against a phantom burn on the source chain.
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