BitGo moves $7.7B in WBTC off LayerZero, picks Chainlink CCIP as its only bridge

In Brief:

• BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) is migrating more than $7.7 billion in Wrapped Bitcoin to Chainlink CCIP and naming it the custodian’s exclusive cross-chain infrastructure provider.
• The legacy provider being dropped is LayerZero, which BitGo picked for WBTC in September 2024.
• The switch pushes the total value covered by announced LayerZero-to-Chainlink migrations to roughly $14.6 billion, following April’s $292 million exploit of Kelp DAO’s LayerZero bridge.

BitGo is pulling Wrapped Bitcoin off LayerZero and standardizing it on Chainlink CCIP, ending an interoperability deal it signed less than two years ago.

Chainlink put the figure at more than $7.7 billion in WBTC. CoinDesk reported the number as about $7.3 billion, with WBTC’s market cap near $7.4 billion, a gap that reflects when each was measured.

“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”

Chainlink said BitGo deprecated the legacy provider “after a rigorous review” and chose CCIP “given it’s the only solution that meets institutional security requirements.”

What changes under the hood

WBTC deployments will use Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Token standard, and CCIP becomes the default for any asset BitGo issues from here. The arrangement leaves BitGo holding its own token contracts and setting rate limits and other controls on transfers between chains.

That control language matters. BitGo’s 2024 setup already kept contract ownership in house, running a 1-of-2-of-3 decentralized verifier network made up of LayerZero Labs, Polyhedra and BitGo itself. The pitch then was that combining proof of authority with zk-proofing cut single-point-of-failure risk.

The exploit that started the exodus

On April 18, attackers drained roughly $292 million, or 116,500 rsETH, from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge. It wasn’t a smart contract bug. LayerZero said its internal RPC nodes, which its verifier network relied on to read source-chain state, were compromised while external nodes were hit with a DDoS, feeding false data to a 1-of-1 DVN and tricking an Ethereum contract into releasing funds against a phantom burn.

A later post-mortem traced the intrusion to March 6, when an attacker used social engineering against a LayerZero Labs developer to get session keys, then breached the company’s RPC cloud infrastructure. LayerZero attributed the incident to TraderTraitor, also tracked as UNC4899, citing research from Mandiant, CrowdStrike and other firms.

LayerZero’s first post-mortem said the protocol “functioned exactly as intended.” Kelp disputed the account, saying LayerZero personnel had approved the 1-of-1 verifier configuration the company later blamed. Dune data showed 47% of active LayerZero OApp contracts were running the same default in April.

The company apologized on May 8. “We own that,” LayerZero said, adding it had done a “terrible job on comms over the past three weeks” and that it “should have led with directness.”

LayerZero has since ended support for the 1/1 configuration. “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. It also announced a Rust-based DVN client for client diversity and changes to its RPC quorum system.

Who else left

Mantle, Kelp, Lombard, Solv Protocol, Virtuals, Re and Kraken have all announced moves to CCIP. Earlier tallies put about $7.24 billion behind those announcements. WBTC roughly doubles it.

Ronin completed its own bridge migration to CCIP, giving the protocol a foothold in gaming infrastructure alongside the custody and restaking names.

Chainlink and BitGo aren’t strangers. BitGo adopted Chainlink Proof of Reserve for WBTC in 2020, putting reserve attestations on chain. And CCIP was spearheaded in part by Ben Chan, Chainlink Labs’ VP of engineering and the architect behind WBTC on Ethereum.

Background

BitGo picked LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token standard on Sept. 10, 2024, deploying WBTC on Avalanche and BNB Chain, then the fourth and seventh largest chains by total value locked. WBTC was already live on Ethereum, Tron, Osmosis and Base. Its market cap at the time was about $8.8 billion.

Two years on, the same asset is moving again, and the deal LayerZero once called its official mandate for WBTC is over.