Crypto projects lost more than $1.1 billion across 212 verified exploits in the first half of 2026, a record count for any six-month period.
Key Points:
- Losses topped $1.1 billion across 212 on-chain exploits between January and June, the highest half-year incident count logged.
- Four breaches, led by KelpDAO at $292 million and Drift Protocol at $285 million, produced about 64% of that total.
- North Korea-linked crews accounted for roughly $609 million, or about 55% of all first-half losses.
Blockaid Report Details Record Crypto Exploits
Blockaid published its first-half security report on Tuesday, and the totals ran higher than rival trackers reported earlier this month.
The on-chain security firm verified 212 separate incidents and more than $1.1 billion in stolen funds between January and June. It also counted 3.4 times as many high-threshold exploits as it recorded across the whole of 2025, a year that carried a far larger dollar total.
Four breaches produced roughly 64% of the half-year figure, down from the 72% that the three largest incidents accounted for across 2025. KelpDAO lost $292 million and Drift Protocol lost $285 million, while an $80 million mint of unbacked Resolv stablecoins and a $50.4 million CowSwap approval rounded out the group.
None of the four turned on a broken line of smart contract code. Attackers compromised a LayerZero developer's credentials, then poisoned RPC infrastructure to forge an attestation that cleared the KelpDAO bridge through a single-DVN configuration flaw.
Newer techniques surfaced too, including the first production EIP-7702 wallet-delegation drain on Arbitrum (ARB), two proof-boundary exploits on Aztec, and at least seven separate bridge incidents.
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North Korea Crews Drive Crypto Hack Losses
Blockaid traced the biggest thefts of the half to a single set of state-linked operators working the same entry point.
The firm attributed the KelpDAO, Drift Protocol and Humanity Protocol breaches to the TraderTraitor subgroup of the Lazarus Group, a combined $609 million, or about 55% of first-half losses. Attackers took admin control of Drift in under 12 minutes in April, one of two large cases that began with social engineering on LinkedIn.
The report said that recruiting pattern has no structural reason to stop, and it expects comparable attacks through the second half of the year.
Ethereum And Solana Chain Loss Totals
Chief executive Ido Ben-Natan put 2025 at $2.58 billion lost across just 63 incidents, with Ethereum (ETH) and Arbitrum leading stolen-fund flow that year.
Solana (SOL) has since taken second place, and more than 98% of its $326 million in losses traced to compromised keys and signing infrastructure.
Ethereum still led the first-half table at roughly $332 million, most of it through flaws in contract code.
CertiK reported $1.32 billion across 344 incidents on Jul. 8, while TRM Labs logged 207 hacks worth $972 million over the same window. All three counts trail last year only because Bybit lost $1.45 billion in one February theft.
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