- Turtle has become the latest DeFi protocol to migrate from LayerZero bridging to Chainlink’s CCIP cross-chain infrastructure.
- Turtle says it decided to move following the $292 million KelpDAO exploit, joining others that have migrated over $4 billion from LayerZero.
Turtle is migrating its assets from the LayerZero bridging infrastructure to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), joining DeFi protocols with over $4 billion in assets in the great bridging migration.
Turtle announced the move today, claiming that it had conducted extensive due diligence and security reviews. Chainlink emerged as the best protocol for Turtle as it “provides the highest level of cross-chain security due to its secure-by-default architecture.”
Following the $292M LayerZero exploit, Turtle has updated its due diligence framework:
• Assets relying on configurable, ad-hoc bridging are priced with a haircut
• Cross-chain tokens integrated with @Chainlink CCIP are preferredThe haircut accounts for the additional… https://t.co/VdWYSEEeop
— Turtle (@turtledotxyz) May 22, 2026
Turtle is a DeFi platform that describes itself as a distribution protocol. It enables DeFi projects to launch on-chain campaigns that attract capital from liquidity pools (LPs) publicly, flipping the previous model that depended on private negotiations with large LPs.
The protocol claims to have processed over $5.5 billion in total value locked in just 18 months of launch and attracted over 400,000 users. Last October, it raised funding from leading names such as Anchorage, Binance, Polygon, 1inch and Gnosis.
The Great Chainlink Migration
Turtle joins other big names in DeFi that have made the switch to Chainlink over the past month, with most migrating from LayerZero. It all started with the KelpDAO hack; as we reported, LayerZero had denied responsibility but buckled days later and admitted it had been breached.
KelpDAO recovered, with the DeFi United coalition raising the funds to compensate for the losses. However, LayerZero is emerging as the biggest loser, with questions over its security now triggering multiple exits.
KelpDAO was the first to switch, but others soon followed. Solv Protocol announced it would be migrating over $700 million worth of Bitcoin-backed assets to Chainlink’s CCIP; Lombard moved $1 billion in Bitcoin assets shortly after; Kraken later announced it was joining the migration with all its wrapped assets; Huma Finance also ditched LayerZero for all its yield products.
In its announcement, Turtle took aim at LayerZero’s lax security protocols. LayerZero lets each issuer choose its own security setup, rather than having a single universal security model. Most projects using its infrastructure chose the default 1-of-1 validator model (which is what KelpDAO was using when it got attacked).
Previously, most LayerZero users chose it because of these simple configurations, but the KelpDAO attack has turned everyone against it. Turtle attacks the model in its post, claiming that “it treats security as a per-issuer configuration choice, where issuers are expected to be cross-chain infrastructure security experts just to establish basic security assurances.”
Chainlink’s CCIP, on the other hand, uses a default setup with a minimum of 16 decentralized node verifiers.
Turtle praises Chainlink’s approach, stating:
“This standardized, secure-by-default architecture not only significantly raises the security floor for all assets using CCIP, by default, but also streamlines risk assessment reviews as capital allocators only need to perform one risk assessment that can be applied equally to all CCIP-enabled assets.”
LINK trades at $9.8 at press time, gainign 1.8% over the past 24 hours as trading volume hit $382.8 million.
