In Brief:
- More than $7.7 billion of Wrapped Bitcoin is being shifted by BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) onto Chainlink CCIP, which the custodian is naming its exclusive cross-chain infrastructure provider.
- LayerZero is the legacy provider getting dropped — the same one BitGo selected for WBTC back in September 2024.
- With this move, announced LayerZero-to-Chainlink migrations now cover roughly $14.6 billion in value, in the wake of April’s $292 million exploit of Kelp DAO’s LayerZero bridge.
Less than two years after signing an interoperability deal with LayerZero, BitGo is ending it, taking Wrapped Bitcoin off the protocol and standardizing the asset on Chainlink CCIP.
The figure cited by Chainlink was more than $7.7 billion in WBTC. CoinDesk put it closer to $7.3 billion and pegged WBTC’s market cap near $7.4 billion — a discrepancy that comes down to the timing of each measurement.
NEW: @BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) migrates $7.7B+ Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) to Chainlink CCIP.
After a rigorous review, BitGo deprecated its legacy bridging provider & chose CCIP as its exclusive cross-chain infra given it’s the only solution that meets institutional security requirements.@ChainlinkView on X ↗
“Security comes first. Always has,” BitGo said in the post announcing the change. “BitGo is migrating away from our legacy solution and selecting @chainlink CCIP as our exclusive cross-chain infrastructure provider, standardizing WBTC and all future BitGo-issued assets on a single, institutional-grade interoperability”
According to Chainlink, the legacy provider was deprecated “after a rigorous review,” with CCIP chosen “given it’s the only solution that meets institutional security requirements.”
What changes under the hood
Chainlink's Cross-Chain Token standard will underpin WBTC deployments, and CCIP becomes the default for every asset BitGo issues going forward. Under the arrangement, BitGo keeps hold of its own token contracts and sets rate limits and other controls on transfers between chains.
That language around control is significant. Contract ownership was already kept in house under BitGo’s 2024 setup, which ran a 1-of-2-of-3 decentralized verifier network comprising LayerZero Labs, Polyhedra and BitGo itself. Back then the argument was that pairing proof of authority with zk-proofing reduced single-point-of-failure risk.
The exploit that started the exodus
Roughly $292 million — 116,500 rsETH — was drained from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge by attackers on April 18. The cause wasn’t a smart contract bug. Per LayerZero, its internal RPC nodes, which the verifier network depended on to read source-chain state, were compromised while external nodes came under a DDoS, feeding false data to a 1-of-1 DVN and tricking an Ethereum contract into releasing funds against a phantom burn.
A subsequent post-mortem dated the intrusion to March 6, when an attacker social-engineered a LayerZero Labs developer out of session keys and went on to breach the firm’s RPC cloud infrastructure. Citing research from Mandiant, CrowdStrike and other firms, LayerZero attributed the incident to TraderTraitor, also tracked as UNC4899.
In its first post-mortem, LayerZero maintained the protocol “functioned exactly as intended.” Kelp took issue with that version of events, saying the 1-of-1 verifier configuration LayerZero later blamed had been signed off on by LayerZero personnel. Dune data showed 47% of active LayerZero OApp contracts were running the same default in April.
An apology followed on May 8. “We own that,” LayerZero said, conceding it had done a “terrible job on comms over the past three weeks” and that it “should have led with directness.”
Support for the 1/1 configuration has since been dropped. “All defaults on all pathways are being migrated to 5/5 where possible and no less than 3/3 on any chain where only 3 DVNs are available,” the company said. A Rust-based DVN client for client diversity and changes to its RPC quorum system were also announced.
Who else left
Moves to CCIP have already been announced by Mantle, Kelp, Lombard, Solv Protocol, Virtuals, Re and Kraken. Those announcements were previously tallied at about $7.24 billion. WBTC roughly doubles that figure.
Ronin has finished migrating its own bridge to CCIP, handing the protocol a foothold in gaming infrastructure to sit alongside the custody and restaking names.
The two companies have history. Chainlink Proof of Reserve was adopted by BitGo for WBTC in 2020, putting reserve attestations on chain. CCIP, meanwhile, was spearheaded in part by Ben Chan, VP of engineering at Chainlink Labs and the architect behind WBTC on Ethereum.
Background
On Sept. 10, 2024, BitGo settled on LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token standard, deploying WBTC to Avalanche and BNB Chain — at the time the fourth and seventh largest chains by total value locked. The asset was already live on Ethereum, Tron, Osmosis and Base, with a market cap then of about $8.8 billion.
Two years later the same asset is on the move again, and the deal LayerZero once billed as its official mandate for WBTC has ended.