The trail behind the $387 million Bitget hack leads through publicly accessible Discord servers and connects to a launderer already tied to the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit, according to on-chain tracing cited by Yahoo Finance.

The findings matter for two reasons. First, they tie one of the largest exchange breaches of the cycle to an actor with a documented track record in decentralized-finance exploits. Second, they show the laundering infrastructure operating partly in the open, coordinating through public Discord channels rather than closed criminal forums.

What does the connection reveal?

The Bitget incident, which drained $387 million from the exchange, now shares operational fingerprints with the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit. Kelp DAO, a restaking protocol built on EigenLayer, suffered the earlier breach, and investigators have traced overlapping wallet activity between the two events.

The launderer identified in the reporting appears in both chains of custody. On-chain records link the same intermediary addresses to funds moving out of Bitget and to the processing of proceeds from the Kelp DAO exploit. That overlap suggests either a single operator or a shared cash-out service serving multiple exploit teams.

Why do public Discords factor in?

Investigators found that coordination points for moving the stolen funds sat in public Discord servers. This detail changes the operational picture. Laundering at this scale has historically moved through invite-only channels, brokers, and over-the-counter desks. Using open Discord infrastructure lowers the barrier for counterparties to join the flow — and lowers the barrier for investigators to map it.

Public channels leave a permanent, timestamped record. Analysts can reconstruct instruction sets, wallet handoffs, and staffing patterns directly from server activity, a materially different evidentiary posture than chasing funds exclusively through mixers and cross-chain bridges.

What are the business consequences?

For Bitget, the $387 million figure sets the scale of the recovery problem. Exchanges hit at this magnitude typically face a choice between covering losses from reserves, restricting withdrawals, or pursuing negotiated returns through blockchain-analytics firms and law enforcement. The Kelp DAO connection gives investigators a named starting point that did not exist in comparable cases where the laundering chain went cold.

For Kelp DAO stakeholders, the finding reopens attribution questions around the $292 million exploit. If the same launderer processed both events, the underlying exploit teams may share members, tooling, or a common commissioning party.

What happens next?

The identification of a laundering intermediary with links across both incidents gives exchanges and protocol teams a concrete address cluster to blacklist and monitor. Expect analytics firms and affected parties to push filings that formalize the link, and expect the next round of enforcement actions to target the cash-out layer — the point where on-chain identities meet regulated off-ramps — rather than the still-anonymous exploit operators themselves.