U.S. court approves Aave to transfer $71 million worth of ETH related to North Korean hacking incident

U.S. Manhattan Federal Court Judge Margaret Garnett approved Aave's asset recovery plan following the rsETH attack incident, allowing approximately $71 million in ETH that had previously been frozen on Arbitrum to be transferred to a wallet controlled by Aave.

Court documents show that this decision modifies a prior injunction against the Arbitrum DAO, allowing the community to complete the ETH transfer through on-chain governance voting, while exempting participants in the voting and execution of the transfer from related legal liabilities. This incident stems from the rsETH attack that occurred in April, which has been widely attributed to the Lazarus Group, linked to North Korea. Previously, lawyers representing the families of North Korean terrorism victims had sought to freeze the related assets and attempted to include them in the compensation for an outstanding judgment of approximately $877 million.

The Arbitrum community has shown strong support in a Snapshot temperature check vote for returning the frozen ETH to Aave's recovery plan, but the actual transfer still requires formal approval through on-chain governance. Reports indicate that this case is also part of the U.S. plaintiffs' efforts to recover crypto assets associated with North Korea. In addition to Arbitrum, the plaintiffs had previously sued the privacy protocol Railgun DAO and listed Digital Currency Group (DCG) as one of the defendants, accusing it of participating in related governance and economic activities.