LayerZero has lost a dozen partners this year as its $ZRO token shed a third of its value. The latest departure is Ethereum node service provider Nethermind, which migrated to Chainlink and terminated its role as verifier on Wednesday. More than $7 billion in assets had migrated off LayerZero by early July, with BitGo’s exit lifting the tally toward $15 billion. The panic began after LayerZero admitted that hackers at Lazarus Group poisoned its internal RPCs in April. Despite defenders arguing that the departures amount to about 3% of actual usage in volume and less than 1% of messages, LayerZero is retreating. In July, it announced it was winding down support for a number of chains with minimal activity across its offchain services and Stargate products. It warned Stargate users that failure to act before chain support is fully deprecated will result in losing access to your funds, and teams still using v1 libraries would face an August 3 shutoff.