On-chain security platform Blockaid revealed that crypto losses from security incidents surpassed $1 billion in the first half of 2026, with the number of verified exploits hitting an all-time high of 212. The findings mark the most-hacked half-year on record by incident count, underscoring a grim milestone for the industry.
Ethereum and Solana bore the brunt of the damage. Projects on Ethereum lost approximately $332 million, primarily due to code vulnerabilities in high-value protocols like restaking and DEX aggregators. Solana-related exploits accounted for roughly $326 million, largely stemming from compromised key and signing infrastructure. Together, the two chains accounted for over $650 million of the total losses.
The single largest incident was the $292 million exploit of KelpDAO, while Drift protocol lost $285 million. Blockaid attributed both attacks to North Korea-linked hackers, noting that the same “LinkedIn social engineering leading to multisig signer compromise” pattern produced two of the four largest incidents. The firm warned there is no structural reason for this trend to stop.
While the dollar losses remained below the year-earlier total—which was inflated by the $1.5 billion Bybit hack—the unprecedented frequency of attacks is cause for alarm. Other security firms, including Immunefi and Quill Audits, corroborated the surge, though their figures varied slightly. Blockaid also cautioned that artificial intelligence-related exploits are likely to increase, citing the first-ever AI agent exploit (Bankr’s $216,000 theft) and predicting multiple AI incidents in the second half of the year.
