Arbitrum Asked to Release $71 Million in Frozen ETH for Kelp Recovery Plan

• A coalition including Aave, Kelp and LayerZero has asked the Arbitrum DAO to release about $71 million in frozen $ETH.
• The funds would go to DeFi United, the coordinated recovery effort set up after the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit.

The DeFi recovery effort around the Kelp DAO exploit is now moving into Arbitrum governance, where one of the biggest unresolved pools of funds remains frozen and politically difficult to touch.

A coalition of major protocols, including Aave, Kelp and LayerZero, filed a Constitutional AIP on the Arbitrum forum on Saturday morning seeking the release of roughly $71 million in frozen $ETH. If approved, the assets would be transferred into DeFi United, the cross-protocol relief effort formed in response to last week’s $292 million Kelp DAO exploit.

The frozen $ETH has become central to the recovery math

That request matters because the Arbitrum-frozen funds are no longer just a security measure. They have become a key piece of the broader recovery equation.

The original freeze was meant to stop the attacker from moving a portion of the stolen assets further through the system. But once those funds were immobilized, the question shifted. Should they remain locked indefinitely, or should governance now redirect them into a coordinated restitution process?

The coalition is clearly arguing for the second route.

DeFi United has emerged as the main vehicle for trying to restore the missing backing behind rsETH, which was at the center of the Kelp exploit fallout. A number of ecosystem players have already floated contributions or support mechanisms, but the frozen $ETH on Arbitrum is different. It is already there, already trapped, and large enough to materially affect whether the recovery package closes the gap cleanly.

Arbitrum governance now faces a harder decision

This is where the issue becomes less technical and more constitutional.

Releasing frozen funds into a recovery vehicle may look sensible from an ecosystem stability standpoint, but it also forces Arbitrum governance to set a precedent around what happens when emergency controls intersect with broader market repair. That is not a small choice for a network that has spent years trying to balance decentralization with credible crisis response.

For Aave, Kelp and LayerZero, the logic is fairly direct. The assets are frozen, the damage is real, and DeFi United already exists as the organizing structure for repair.

For Arbitrum tokenholders, the question is more delicate. Whether the network should merely freeze stolen funds or actively decide where they go next is exactly the kind of governance problem decentralized systems prefer to avoid, until they no longer can.