Who Is Amitej Gajjala and How the KelpDAO Founder Is Navigating a 294M Hack

Amitej Gajjala is the co-founder of KelpDAO, the Ethereum liquid restaking protocol that lost roughly $292 million in 116,500 rsETH on April 18, 2026, when attackers linked to North Korea's Lazarus Group exploited a single-verifier LayerZero bridge configuration. Five weeks after the hack, Kelp confirmed that rsETH backing had been fully restored at 1-to-1 thanks to a seven-protocol coalition called DeFi United, led by Aave, that pooled more than 100,000 ETH to plug the hole. Gajjala is the same operator who co-built Stader Labs into a multi-chain liquid staking platform starting in 2021 before launching Kelp on top of EigenLayer in late 2023, and his name is now permanently tied to the largest DeFi exploit of 2026 and to one of the cleanest cross-protocol recoveries the industry has run.

The reason this profile matters right now is that KelpDAO's reputation, and Gajjala's standing as a founder, is being rewritten in real time. The protocol's pre-hack TVL sat near $1.7 billion. The post-hack credibility test is no longer about rebuilding the bridge. It is about getting users back, watching bigger LRT protocols copy the recovery playbook, and seeing if the founder who shipped the original 1-of-1 DVN setup can keep operating control of a protocol that just put DeFi through a $13 billion TVL wipeout. Here is the operator behind that story.

From IIT Madras and ZS Associates to Stader Labs

Gajjala's path into crypto reads like a textbook Indian fintech operator track. He earned a bachelor's in electrical and electronics engineering from IIT Madras in 2009 and an MBA from IIM Calcutta in 2014, with consulting stints at ZS Associates and A.T. Kearney sandwiched between, then operator roles at the media-tech startup Zapr and at Indian on-demand giant Swiggy as assistant vice president. Engineering training plus top-tier consulting reps, then real product and ops experience inside a hyper-growth marketplace company before founding anything of his own.

In April 2021 he co-founded Stader Labs with Sidhartha Doddipalli and Dheeraj Borra, the team that would later build Kelp. Stader was a multi-chain liquid staking play built for the moment when ETH staking was still locked up and Polygon, BNB, Hedera, Terra, and Solana validators all needed user-friendly staking front ends. It raised from Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, and Jump and grew into one of the more recognizable LST issuers outside Lido and Rocket Pool, before pivoting harder into Ethereum as EigenLayer's restaking thesis matured.

The honest read on his background is that Gajjala is a methodical operator, not a cryptographer. He did not write the smart contracts and he did not design the LayerZero verifier model that failed in April. What he did do is repeatedly identify a yield primitive that retail wanted, build a clean product on top of it, and ship distribution faster than most of his competitors. That skill set is exactly what is being tested now.

Why He Built KelpDAO and the LRT Thesis

KelpDAO launched in late 2023, weeks after EigenLayer opened restaking, and went straight at the bet that liquid restaking tokens would become the dominant ETH-staking primitive of the next cycle. The pitch was simple. Stake ETH, restake it on EigenLayer to secure additional networks, and get a single liquid token called rsETH that users could move into DeFi while still earning both base staking yield and restaking points. The Phemex breakdown of how restaking works explains the underlying mechanic in plain English.

Gajjala framed Kelp publicly as the bridge between the Stader playbook and the new EigenLayer economy. The team already knew how to issue LSTs, distribute them across chains, and manage validator operations at scale, and it ported that operational muscle into the LRT category at a moment when EtherFi, Renzo, Puffer, and Kelp were all racing for share. By early 2026 Kelp had grown into one of the largest LRT protocols by TVL, with rsETH integrated as collateral on Aave, Compound, and most EVM blue-chip lending venues.

The thesis worked, which is also why the hack hurt so much. When 116,500 fraudulent rsETH was minted on Unichain and laundered into Aave as backing for $190M in legitimate borrows, the consequences did not stay inside Kelp. They cascaded into Aave's bad-debt risk, into rsETH price across every secondary market, and into the broader LRT category's credibility. The price of being a successful LRT is that your failure mode becomes everyone's failure mode.

What the April 18 Hack Actually Was, Technically

This was not a Solidity bug. The Kelp contracts were not broken. The attack targeted LayerZero's off-chain verification infrastructure and the specific configuration Kelp had chosen for rsETH's cross-chain bridge.

rsETH was configured with a 1-of-1 DVN setup, meaning only one decentralized verifier network had to approve cross-chain transfers, and that single DVN was LayerZero Labs' own. According to the Chainalysis post-mortem, the attackers compromised the internal RPC nodes that fed source-chain data into the DVN, simultaneously launched a DDoS attack against the external RPC backups, and forced the verifier to rely on poisoned data. The DVN then approved a phantom rsETH burn on the source chain that never actually happened. On the destination side, Ethereum mainnet, the contract did exactly what it was designed to do and minted 116,500 unbacked rsETH on Unichain that the attacker then bridged out and weaponized as Aave collateral. CoinDesk's reporting attributed the operation to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored crew also known as UNC4899.

The blame question got messy in public. LayerZero initially pointed at Kelp for choosing the 1-of-1 setup. Kelp pointed back at LayerZero for ever offering that configuration as a default and for operating the single DVN that got compromised. On May 9, LayerZero conceded it had "made a mistake" in allowing its own verifier to secure high-value assets in a 1-of-1 setup, and it has since committed to migrating every default to 5-of-5, or no less than 3-of-3 on chains with limited DVN options. The lesson the rest of DeFi is now writing into its risk frameworks is that "decentralized" verifier networks are only as strong as their quorum size, and a quorum of one is a centralized oracle in a different jacket.

His Leadership Response and the DeFi United Coalition

Gajjala's first 72 hours after the hack were quieter than the X crowd wanted. He did not post a viral apology thread or run a public X Spaces in the immediate aftermath, and The Block reported that he and Kelp did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The work happened behind the scenes, where it arguably mattered more.

The fast and credible part of the response was the DeFi United coalition. Within five days of the exploit, Aave's service providers, with Gajjala and the Kelp team coordinating on the protocol side, pulled together a seven-protocol cross-DeFi relief fund explicitly designed to make rsETH whole without socializing losses to Aave depositors. Lido contributed 2,500 stETH, EtherFi added 5,000 ETH, LayerZero put up 10,000 ETH, Ethena and Mantle pitched in, Aave founder Stani Kulechov personally contributed 5,000 ETH, and the coalition's commitments climbed past 100,000 ETH within weeks. The pooled fund reached roughly 69,534 ETH (~$161 million) by April 24 and kept growing through late April and May.

The number that gives Gajjala a leg to stand on is the recovery math. Of the 112,103 unbacked rsETH that ultimately ended up in scope, roughly 106,993 was recovered through Aave liquidations and Compound liquidations. The remaining shortfall, about 5,200 rsETH, was covered by the coalition itself plus the final 20,373 rsETH tranche Kelp sent into the LayerZero locking contract on May 22. Cointelegraph confirmed rsETH backing returned to 100% five weeks after the hack. The credibility win is not that Gajjala personally rescued anything. It is that the founder did not try to socialize the loss, did not try to bend governance against Aave depositors, and did not torch the cross-protocol relationships Kelp will need for the next five years.

What KelpDAO's Recovery Looks Like and What Comes Next

rsETH withdrawals went live across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Linea, and Mantle in mid-May, and Aave restored WETH borrow limits on May 18 once the worst of the bad-debt risk cleared. Operationally the protocol is functional again, but the harder question is reputational and the TVL hit was real. Pre-hack KelpDAO sat near $1.7 billion, and broader DeFi shed roughly $13 billion in TVL across the 48 hours after the exploit per DefiLlama, with Aave alone losing more than $6 billion in deposits. Even with rsETH backing fully restored, trust does not auto-rebuild. Users who pulled stETH and rsETH to cold wallets during the panic do not redeploy because a coalition press release said the math is fine. They redeploy when validators-of-validators, lending markets, and audit firms publicly recertify the new bridge architecture, and after the protocol survives a few months of operating without another scare.

Three things are worth watching from here. First, how aggressively Kelp commits to multi-DVN verifier setups and publishes the new architecture, because anything short of an explicit 5-of-5 or 3-of-3 commitment will leave the same single-point-of-failure scar visible. Second, the rate at which competing LRT protocols copy the DeFi United playbook for their own future incidents, which would turn what happened here into the industry's first real post-mortem-and-bailout standard. Third, the question of Gajjala's role going forward, including the possibility of him stepping back into a chairman-style seat and handing operating CEO duties to someone with an explicit security and infrastructure background.

The protocol's reputation now lives or dies on what does not happen next. No second incident. No quiet reduction in security spend once headlines fade. No attempt to socialize any remaining residual loss against rsETH holders. If Kelp clears those bars across the back half of 2026, Gajjala ends this episode as the founder who made the largest DeFi hack of the year recoverable. If it does not, he becomes the case study for why LRTs concentrate systemic risk.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Amitej Gajjala and what does he do at KelpDAO?

He is the co-founder of KelpDAO, the Ethereum liquid restaking protocol that issues the rsETH token, and previously co-founded multi-chain liquid staking platform Stader Labs in 2021. Trained as an engineer at IIT Madras with an MBA from IIM Calcutta and consulting stints at ZS Associates and A.T. Kearney, his operating background is in product and growth rather than cryptography or smart contract security.

Was the KelpDAO hack the fault of Amitej Gajjala personally?

Not directly. The exploit targeted a 1-of-1 LayerZero DVN configuration that LayerZero itself later admitted it should not have offered as a default, and the compromised verifier was run by LayerZero Labs, not Kelp. That said, Gajjala oversaw the protocol that chose the configuration, and the buck for what users sign on rsETH bridges ultimately stops with the founder seat.

Is rsETH safe to hold now that backing is restored?

Kelp has confirmed that rsETH backing returned to 100% in late May 2026, and withdrawals are live again across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Linea, and Mantle. The honest answer is that on-chain solvency is one input but trust is the other one, and the protocol still has to operate without a second incident for several quarters before LRT users treat rsETH the way they did pre-April.

Why did DeFi United matter for the recovery?

It set a precedent that DeFi protocols can coordinate a multi-hundred-million-dollar shortfall across competitors instead of letting one exploit cascade into permanent bad debt on a lending venue. The coalition pooled more than 100,000 ETH from Aave, Lido, EtherFi, LayerZero, Ethena, Mantle, and individual contributors, and it gives Kelp a template the next LRT protocol to get hit can copy instead of inventing a response from scratch.

Bottom Line

Gajjala is not the founder who ships the most viral apology thread, and that is exactly why the May rsETH restoration matters more than any X post he could have written. The recovery math is credible on paper, but credibility lives downstream of execution. Watch three specific things across the rest of 2026. First, the date Kelp publishes its post-bridge architecture and the DVN quorum size it commits to, because anything short of 3-of-3 leaves the original failure mode intact. Second, the rate at which net new rsETH deposits return to even half of pre-hack levels by Q3, because that is the cleanest signal of restored user trust. Third, the founder's own positioning, including a possible restructure of leadership to bring in a security-first operator, because that decision tells the market how seriously Kelp is taking the infrastructure lesson. The largest DeFi hack of 2026 is technically fixed. The open question of how Kelp comes back as a top-three LRT, or fades into the long tail of "remember when" protocols, is still entirely in the founder's hands.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.