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DeFi United Unveils Plan to Restore rsETH After $292M Kelp DAO Exploit

DeFi United Unveils Plan to Restore rsETH After $292M Kelp DAO Exploit

Plus: ⚛️ Solana developers pick Falcon to fight quantum threats | 🏛️ White House hints at 'big announcement' on bitcoin reserve

David Okoya
April 28, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 🔥 DeFi's largest-ever coordinated bailout has a blueprint — and it's designed so rsETH holders don't take a haircut

• ⚛️ Solana has an answer to the quantum threat — and it says performance won't take a meaningful hit

• 🏛️ The White House is ready to make its next move on the bitcoin reserve — expect an announcement in weeks

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DeFi United Unveils Technical Plan to Restore rsETH After $292M Kelp Exploit

DeFi United has released the technical blueprint for restoring full backing to rsETH after the April 18 Kelp DAO exploit. The plan calls for converting committed ETH into rsETH in staged tranches and depositing them into Kelp's bridge lockbox at the current exchange ratio of 1.07 ETH per rsETH, then running governance-approved liquidations to recover roughly 13,000 ETH from eight Aave positions and around 16,776 ETH in funds from Compound.

Pledges now exceed $300 million, with major contributions from Consensys and Joe Lubin (30,000 ETH), Aave DAO (25,000 ETH proposal pending governance), Mantle, and others. The plan is explicitly designed to avoid imposing a haircut on rsETH holders — a notable departure from how past DeFi failures have been resolved. The April 18 attack, linked with preliminary confidence to North Korea's Lazarus Group, saw an attacker forge a LayerZero cross-chain message to mint 116,500 unbacked rsETH and borrow roughly $190 million against them on Aave.

Solana Names Falcon as Its Answer to the Quantum Threat

The Solana Foundation published a quantum readiness update on Monday, saying two of the network's core developer teams independently reached the same conclusion without coordinating.

Both Anza and Jump Crypto's Firedancer spent months studying post-quantum migration paths and landed on the same solution, a digital signature scheme called Falcon, built for the compact signatures and high throughput that Solana's architecture demands. Both teams have already built initial implementations, and the foundation says the transition, when it comes, will be unlikely to meaningfully affect network performance.

The foundation's position is that quantum computing remains years away from posing a real threat to existing cryptography, but that the complexity of upgrading decentralized systems makes early preparation essential. The roadmap is phased: continued research first, then post-quantum signatures for new wallets if the threat becomes credible, and finally migration of existing wallets. Parts of the ecosystem are already ahead — Blueshift's Winternitz Vault, a quantum-resistant primitive, has been live on Solana for more than two years and was recently cited in a Google Quantum AI whitepaper.

White House Crypto Advisor Teases 'Big Announcement' on Bitcoin Reserve

The Trump administration's strategic bitcoin reserve is moving closer to its next step, according to Patrick Witt, executive director of the President's Council of Advisors for Digital Assets. Speaking Monday at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Witt told attendees that a significant announcement on the reserve is expected within weeks.

"In the next few weeks, we'll be making a big announcement," Witt said. "I think we have a bit of a breakthrough there, and obviously that needs to be followed up with legislation." He added that the administration expects to "take a big step forward from the executive branch side."

Witt framed the coming action as progress on the legal interpretations and operational framework the administration has been building since President Trump signed the strategic bitcoin reserve executive order in March 2025, which seeded the reserve with bitcoin the government holds from criminal and civil forfeitures.

On the legislative front, Rep. Nick Begich announced at the same conference that he is reintroducing his strategic bitcoin reserve bill under the new name the American Reserves Modernization Act (ARMA), which includes a proposal to accumulate up to 1 million bitcoin over five years using budget-neutral strategies.

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🏛️ President Trump walked back criticism of prediction markets over the weekend, saying "very smart people" he knows support the industry, two days after blaming them for turning the world into "a casino." Trump added that the U.S. could fall behind other countries if it doesn't engage with the sector, though he stopped short of endorsing any policy changes.
📈 Bitcoin led $1.2 billion in weekly inflows to global crypto investment products last week, a fourth consecutive week of positive flows, according to CoinShares. Ether products added $192 million, their third straight week above $190 million, while total assets under management rose to $155 billion, the highest since February 1.
📈 Strategy bought 3,273 bitcoin for $255 million in the week ended April 26, a sharp slowdown from the $2.54 billion it spent the prior week. The company funded the latest purchases by selling $255 million in common stock rather than the STRC preferred shares that have driven most of April's roughly $4.1 billion in total buying, the most in a year.
💸 Bitmine bought 101,901 ETH last week for roughly $236 million, pushing its holdings above 5 million tokens and making it the world's largest corporate ether treasury at 4.21% of circulating supply. Chairman Tom Lee framed the purchase around his view that ETH is becoming a wartime store of value, citing the asset's outperformance of the S&P 500 by 1,696 basis points since the Iran conflict began.
🇫🇷 France charged 88 people, including 10 minors, across 12 cases tied to violent "wrench attacks" on crypto holders, with 75 held in pretrial detention. National prosecutors said suspects appear in multiple cases, pointing to structured criminal networks; France has recorded 135 such incidents since 2023, including 47 already in 2026.
🔒 ZetaChain halted cross-chain transactions on its mainnet after an attacker exploited its GatewayEVM smart contract. The team said only internal wallets were affected, with losses estimated at around $300,000, and that the attack vector has been blocked pending a full post-mortem.
💸 Jack Dorsey's Block published its Q1 2026 Proof of Reserves, confirming the company holds a combined 28,355 BTC across its own treasury and customer balances, with all transactions independently verified. The release underscores the company's ongoing push to bring Bitcoin transparency standards to its products and corporate holdings.
💰 Strive bought 789 bitcoin for roughly $61 million, bringing its total holdings to 14,557 BTC valued at about $1.1 billion. Its True North subsidiary also announced a Bitcoin for Business summit for corporate leaders on May 21 in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
🏦 Kalshi completed its first institutional block trade, with Jump Trading providing liquidity for a custom event contract created for a Houston-based environmental hedge fund seeking exposure to California carbon allowance auction prices. The trade was brokered by CFTC-licensed introducing broker Greenlight Commodities and marks the first time institutional block orders have been executed through prediction market infrastructure.

🇨🇦 Canada's Bill C-25 cleared second reading in the House of Commons with cross-party support, moving a proposed ban on crypto political donations to committee review. The Strong and Free Elections Act would prohibit crypto contributions to federal campaigns alongside money orders and prepaid payment products, following a recommendation from the country's Chief Electoral Officer who cited the difficulty of verifying contributor identities.

💰 Hut 8 priced $3.25 billion in investment-grade senior secured notes due 2042 through a subsidiary to fund a 245-megawatt data center at its River Bend campus in St. Francisville, Louisiana, with the deal expected to close April 30. The project is anchored by a 15-year, ~$7 billion lease with cloud startup Fluidstack, with Google providing a financial backstop covering lease payments.
💰 Luxor Technology Corporation committed $100 million to purchase MicroBT WhatsMiner mining rigs as part of an expanded partnership that also includes MicroBT signing a term sheet to make a strategic investment in Luxor. Alongside the hardware deal, Luxor is extending its LuxOS firmware to WhatsMiner machines, giving operators access to power targeting, thermal management, and faster curtailment ramp-up on top of the company's existing 300,000-machine install base.
💰 Four Pillars, a South Korean blockchain research and technology firm, raised a Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Further Ventures (backed by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADQ) as anchor investor. The round values the Seoul-based company at roughly $20 million and will fund an expansion from crypto research into institutional validator infrastructure and consulting services.

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