The governance of the L2 network Arbitrum has initiated a vote on transferring 30,766 ETH (~$71 million) to the DeFi United fund, established to aid the sector’s recovery following the Kelp hack.
The project’s security council had previously frozen these assets at the hacker’s address and moved them to an “interim frozen wallet.”
The discussion will continue until May 7. At the time of publication, the community had cast 34 million ARB in support of the proposal.
The Arbitrum security council’s decision to freeze the perpetrator’s funds has divided the community. Some participants criticized the possibility of manual intervention in the network’s state, while others deemed the actions justified given the scale of the damage.
Largest Contribution to DeFi United
As of May 1, DeFi United had raised over $314 million—enough to fully cover the $290 million damage from the Kelp hack.
If the vote concludes with approval, the Arbitrum DAO will become the largest donor to the initiative. For comparison:
- ConsenSys and Joseph Lubin jointly allocated 30,000 ETH;
- Mantle provided a loan of 30,000 ETH;
- The Aave DAO is considering transferring 25,000 ETH, in addition to 5,000 ETH from protocol founder Stani Kulechov;
- LayerZero directed 5,000 ETH and placed another 5,000 ETH in Aave;
- Kelp contributed 2,000 ETH.
April was one of the most productive months for hackers. The industry’s losses reached $651 million, noted CertiK specialists. This is the highest figure since March 2022, when the sector lost $715 million.
Combining all the incidents in April we’ve confirmed ~$651M lost to exploits with
~$3.5M of the total attributed to phishing.April has had the highest losses recorded since March 2022 (~$715M), excluding Feb 2025 (Bybit).
More details below 👇 pic.twitter.com/x9uAbLbtMz
— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) April 30, 2026
The main damage was caused by two incidents: Drift at the beginning of the month lost $285 million, followed by the Kelp hack.
On April 30, the Wasabi protocol fell victim to a hacker attack. Hackers withdrew over $5 million.