According to DefiLlama, April 2026 became the most eventful month in terms of hacks in the history of the crypto industry. The stolen assets are being laundered through cross-chain bridges and mixers.
Exchanges are responding with increased monitoring of suspicious transactions, but ordinary users seeking to ensure the anonymity of their transfers are also affected. Together with the team from the Bitcoin mixer Mixer.Money, we explore how to maintain privacy without risking fund freezes.
What Happened in April 2026
According to PeckShield, there were 40 major incidents in the crypto industry last month. Total losses reached $647 million, with illegal activities causing a staggering 1140% increase in losses compared to March ($52.2 million). CertiK reported a figure of $651 million. While this amount is not a record, analysts agree that the number of individual attacks has surpassed historical levels.
On April 1, hackers completely drained Drift Protocol on Solana in just 12 minutes, resulting in losses of $285 million, making it one of the largest attacks in the industry's history.
On April 17, the Kelp liquid restaking protocol was hacked. The attackers withdrew approximately $293 million from the Kelp DAO cross-chain bridge based on LayerZero, then deposited it into Aave v3 as collateral to receive WETH.
Chainalysis, TRM Labs, and Elliptic linked both incidents to groups controlled by North Korea. TRM Labs estimated that North Korean hackers stole about $577 million in the first four months of 2026, accounting for 76% of all losses in cryptocurrency projects during that period.
In addition to the two major exploits, dozens of smaller incidents occurred in April, including hacks of Wasabi ($5 million), Volo ($3.5 million), Syndicate ($330,000), and others.
Why Users Are Suffering
Hackers quickly move stolen coins through cross-chain bridges and exchange them for Bitcoin. This helps them avoid freezing (in the case of centralized stablecoins like USDT) and attempt to cover their tracks by breaking transactions into smaller amounts.
Meanwhile, exchanges are ramping up automated transaction scoring. Systems like Chainalysis KYT, Elliptic Lens, and TRM Wallet Screening assign risk levels: critical (severe), high, medium, and low. Most exchanges automatically block deposits linked to addresses of criminals.
The key issue for users is indirect exposure, as scoring considers not only direct contact with a suspicious service. A user might have used CoinJoin six months ago for legitimate privacy protection, but after the April hacks, their coins suddenly fell into the same category as stolen assets.
“CoinJoin transactions are easily identifiable on-chain. AML services automatically increase the risk score of such assets, and exchanges often block funds after mixing,” noted Mixer.Money.
CoinJoin mixes users' coins together, resulting in participants receiving Bitcoin with the transaction history of others, which may include anyone, even North Korean hackers. On-chain analytics detect the characteristic pattern of combined transactions and mark the outputs as high-risk.
How to Avoid Blocking
To ensure anonymity on the blockchain without risking fund blocking, users can utilize services that conceal the passage of coins through mixers. For instance, Mixer.Money in “Full Anonymity” mode allows users to sever on-chain links using exchange reserves. The service operates as follows:
- User's Bitcoins go into a premixer and are split into random parts.
- The coins are sent to investors—independent traders who operate on major international platforms.
- The user receives Bitcoins from other exchanges to two new addresses.
For on-chain analytics, this transaction appears as a regular withdrawal from an exchange to a personal wallet. The wallets of major exchanges in Chainalysis and Elliptic systems represent “monolithic clusters” worth billions of dollars—individual withdrawals are indistinguishable without the exchange's internal KYC data. The fact of using a mixer is concealed, and the risk score remains minimal.
“Unlike CoinJoin, our algorithm excludes mixing clients' funds with each other. The user receives an equivalent amount of coins recently withdrawn from exchanges with a completely different history,” explained Mixer.Money.
The service offers three modes:
- “Mixer” — basic privacy for a 1% fee and up to two hours of waiting. Coins are mixed with other clients' assets;
- “Full Anonymity” — maximum protection level for a 4–5% fee and up to 10 hours of waiting. Exchange reserves are used;
- “Exact Payment” — sending funds to a third party through the mixer. The seller receives payment “from the exchange” within six hours.
The service requires no registration and provides a guarantee letter with a PGP signature. A free test is available: by sending 0.001 BTC, the user receives it back without a fee.
Better Not to Mix
The April wave of hacks demonstrated that now is not the best time to experiment with CoinJoin and other anonymization tools that leave on-chain traces. Exchanges are trying to identify stolen assets, so using such services will attract unwanted attention.
To minimize risks, experts at Mixer.Money recommend checking the risk score in advance. Before depositing on an exchange, run the address through AML services. If the address is already flagged, the deposit could lead to freezing.
Also, choose services whose outputs on-chain analytics do not associate with mixers.
“The main mistake is sending coins from a CoinJoin mixer directly to a CEX deposit. This is the fastest way to get blocked. The ‘Full Anonymity’ mode solves this problem: the user receives Bitcoins that on-chain analytics see as a regular withdrawal from the exchange, not as an output from a mixer,” summarized Mixer.Money.
The 40 hacks in a month also remind us that, in addition to being cautious with anonymization tools, attention should be paid to the security of cryptocurrency storage. Mixer.Money recommends:
- revoking old permissions. Every interaction with a DeFi protocol leaves an approve—permission for the smart contract to withdraw tokens from your wallet. If the protocol is hacked, this permission can become a vector for attack. You can check and revoke issued approves through Revoke.cash: just connect your wallet and revoke access for services you no longer use;
- transferring major holdings to a hardware wallet. Hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor sign transactions within a secure chip—private keys never leave the device and are inaccessible even if your computer or smartphone is compromised. Basic models cost around $60, which is negligible compared to potential losses.
Finally, do not keep everything in one place. The difficult April showed that even protocols with a TVL in the billions can be vulnerable.