Kelp DAO has brought its token back online, five weeks after a $293 million exploit forced the decentralized finance protocol to halt operations. Withdrawals reopened earlier this month, and the team says mints, redemptions, and rewards are running normally again.
The scale of the exploit
The hack, one of the larger DeFi breaches this year, drained nearly $300 million in assets from the protocol. Kelp DAO quickly suspended its token contract to stop further losses, leaving users unable to move funds or interact with the system. Investigators later traced the attack to a flaw in the project's smart contract logic.
Five weeks of rebuilding
For more than a month, the platform stayed offline while developers worked to patch the vulnerability and test a safe restart. The DAO's community voted on the restoration plan, which included a new token contract and a process to let affected users reclaim their holdings. No timeline was given during the blackout, leaving many holders in the dark.
What's working now
With the new contract live, users can mint and redeem tokens again. Rewards distributions have resumed. The protocol's liquidity pools are active, though trading volume is still below pre-hack levels. Kelp DAO hasn't disclosed whether any of the stolen funds were recovered or if law enforcement is involved.
For now, the token is functioning as intended. But the question of whether the DAO can rebuild trust — and how much of the $293 million might ever come back — remains unanswered.
