Chainlink

When a regulated exchange remediates a live exploit by switching bridge providers, it does not just solve its own problem. It sets the benchmark every other institution now has to answer to.

A $3 billion bridge migration on May 14 signals that institutional crypto infrastructure is consolidating around auditable security, and LayerZero is on the wrong side of that bet.

When the institution that settles most of U.S. securities trading standardizes a technology, it stops being an experiment and becomes infrastructure.

The Kelp DAO exploit was not a smart contract failure. It was a middleware failure, and that distinction is reshaping how institutional capital thinks about tokenized asset infrastructure.