Author: CoinDesk

Translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Summary: After $292 million was stolen from the Kelp cross-chain bridge, LayerZero is facing an industry-wide abandonment. BitGo has migrated its $7.3 billion WBTC cross-chain infrastructure from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP, along with previous announcements of migrations from Mantle, Kraken, and others, resulting in a total loss of funds for LayerZero reaching $14.6 billion. This wave of migration reveals a harsh reality: in the field of DeFi infrastructure, a single security incident is enough to destroy years of accumulated trust.

The crypto infrastructure company BitGo will replace LayerZero with Chainlink as the sole cross-chain service provider for its $7.3 billion WBTC assets. This brings the total amount of funds announced to have migrated from LayerZero to Chainlink close to $15 billion.

This wave of migration began earlier this year when the Kelp DAO's LayerZero-based cross-chain bridge suffered an attack of $292 million, triggering a strict review of LayerZero's bridging configurations. Subsequently, projects such as Mantle, Kelp, Lombard, Solv Protocol, Virtuals, Re, and Kraken have announced their transition to Chainlink's CCIP.

WBTC is a tokenized version of Bitcoin, designed to track its value. Unlike native Bitcoin, it can be used in decentralized finance applications on other blockchains for trading, lending, and collateral.

According to CoinMarketCap data, WBTC currently has a market capitalization of about $7.4 billion. Adding the previously announced migration of $7.24 billion, the total amount of cross-chain infrastructure funds migrating to CCIP is approximately $14.6 billion.

BitGo stated that it will use Chainlink's cross-chain token standard to unify WBTC deployments and will default to using CCIP for future issued assets.

This architecture allows BitGo to retain control over the token contracts and set rate limits and other controls for managing cross-chain transfers.

In 2024, BitGo chose LayerZero to expand WBTC's cross-chain capabilities, initially for deployment on Avalanche and BNB Chain. Its configuration requires BitGo's own validators and LayerZero or Polyhedra to approve each cross-chain transfer.

The Chainlink directory has listed WBTC liquidity pools supporting CCIP on Ethereum and Ronin. The announcement did not specify a completion timeline for the broader migration.