Months After the $292M Kelp Hack, Chainlink Lets Institutions Add Their Own Bridge Checks

In brief

• Chainlink launched CCIP 2.0 on Monday, letting institutions operate their own custom verifiers instead of depending solely on Chainlink's default network.
• The upgrade lands five months after LayerZero-linked Kelp DAO lost $292 million to hackers tied to North Korea, a hack that pushed Kraken and Lombard to Chainlink.
• Chainlink's own docs confirm "the Risk Management Network's automated offchain role is no longer active in current CCIP deployments," ending its job as an independent second check on transfers.

Chainlink today launched CCIP 2.0, the newest version of its cross-chain plumbing—the software layer banks and crypto projects increasingly use to move tokenized money, like stablecoins, wrapped Bitcoin, and tokenized funds, between blockchains without building a bridge from scratch.

That plumbing exists because blockchains don't talk to each other. Ethereum has no idea what's happening on Solana. So when a token moves from one chain to another, something has to confirm the money really left one place before it shows up on the other—that something is called a bridge, and it works by trusting a verifier to vouch for the transfer.

That trust has been expensive. Bridges have lost billions to hackers over the years, usually because they lean on a single point of failure: one verifier, one thing to trick.