During the first half of 2026, cryptocurrency projects experienced losses of approximately $1.1 billion due to hacks, marking a record number of confirmed exploits for any six-month period. This information comes from a report by Blockaid.

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The report described this timeframe as "the most hacked half-year in history" based on the number of incidents, which totaled 212 successful attacks, although the amount stolen was lower than in previous years. The number of exploits was 3.4 times higher than the total for all of 2025.

Monthly breakdown of exploits and losses. Source: Blockaid.

In dollar terms, losses were less severe compared to the same period last year, which saw a surge primarily due to a $1.5 billion hack of Bybit.

According to Blockaid, the majority of the stolen funds—55%—were linked to actors associated with North Korea. Analysts attributed attacks on Drift (with a loss of $285 million) and KelpDAO ($292 million) to these actors, predicting continued activity from North Korean hackers.

Blockaid highlighted social engineering tactics via LinkedIn and subsequent compromises of multi-signature wallet signers as key strategies used by hackers. This method was implicated in two of the four largest incidents reported in the half-year period.

Blockaid's estimates differ from those of Immunefi, which reported in its June 2026 Ecosystem Update that industry losses for the first half of the year were around $972 million across 207 incidents. Quill Audits provided a similar figure of $935.3 million in 87 DeFi hacks during the same period. Immunefi also noted a record number of incidents over six months and indicated that losses from DeFi projects in 2026 were still 74% lower than the peak in 2022.

When analyzing losses by blockchain, the largest amounts were attributed to Ethereum and Solana, with $332 million and $326 million, respectively.

Losses by blockchain. Source: Blockaid.

For Ethereum, Blockaid identified a trend of "large-scale code exploits," as the blockchain hosts some of the most valuable protocols, including restaking, stablecoins, and DEX aggregators. In contrast, attacks on Solana tended to target the infrastructure of signers rather than smart contracts.

A separate risk for the second half of the year includes exploits related to artificial intelligence. Blockaid cited the hack of Bankr involving $216,000 as the first such incident and warned of potential future attacks on AI agents through prompt injections, leading to misuse of tools and unauthorized signing.

It is noteworthy that in July, a test of the OpenAI model inadvertently compromised the infrastructure of the Hugging Face neural network platform.