Overview
- Kraken, which disclosed the change Thursday, will deprecate LayerZero and make Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol the exclusive rail for kBTC and all future Kraken Wrapped Assets.
- The migration covers Ink, Ethereum, Unichain, and Optimism with more networks expected, and kBTC holders do not need to take any action as Kraken keeps issuing and custodying the underlying bitcoin.
- Kraken cited CCIP’s defenses such as 16 independent node operators for each transfer, native rate limits, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance as the key reasons for the switch.
- The move follows the April 18 Kelp DAO breach tied to a single-verifier LayerZero setup and poisoned off-chain RPCs, an attack later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group; LayerZero has ended support for 1/1 verifier configurations and begun security changes.
- Chainlink says more than $3 billion in value has recently migrated to its infrastructure as Kelp, Solv, and Re switch providers, and Coinbase previously standardized its wrapped tokens on CCIP.