TL;DR:
- Hackers carried out 83 incidents in Q2 2026, the quarter with the most exploits ever recorded in the history of the crypto industry.
- $755 million was stolen: cross-chain bridges were the hardest-hit attack vector, accounting for $351 million in losses.
- KelpDAO and Drift Protocol suffered the largest losses of the quarter, with $293 million and $280 million respectively.
The second quarter of 2026 became the most critical period in the history of the crypto industry by volume of incidents. According to an analysis by market intelligence platform Unfolded based on data from DefiLlama, hackers executed 83 exploits against various cryptocurrency protocols during the quarter, surpassing any previous record in number of attacks. In terms of value stolen, the $755.3 million from Q2 2026 falls far short of the all-time record: the $3.56 billion lost in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Dmytro Tarasiuk, chief product officer at risk intelligence platform CORE3 and security rating platform CER.live, attributes the lower magnitude of losses in part to the decline in total value locked in the DeFi market. That metric dropped from $164 billion prior to the liquidation event on October 10 to approximately $73 billion at the time of publication. Tarasiuk also noted that protocols re-engineer themselves faster than their operational complexity can be managed, generating very specific vulnerabilities: projects that declare a multisig while storing multiple keys on a single device.
Q2 2026 is already the most-hacked quarter on record, with ~70 hacks, 2X the record.
But the total amount hacked ($746M) is a fraction of the previous peaks. Rather than a few giga exploits, it's been a constant stream of smaller attacks pic.twitter.com/wQjaIRlegJ
— unfolded. (@cryptounfolded) June 22, 2026
Bridges Remain the Industry’s Achilles’ Heel
Exploits targeting cross-chain bridges resulted in losses of $351 million, the largest share of total damage recorded in the quarter. The hack on the LayerZero OFT bridge, which led to $293 million being stolen from KelpDAO, accounted for more than 38% of the value stolen during the period. Attacks involving admin credential theft and artificial token price manipulation explained 37% of the remaining losses, while private key compromises represented 5.66% of the total.
The Taiko network, a layer-2 blockchain on Ethereum, was the most recent case: hackers stole $1.7 million by compromising the chain state verification mechanism of one of its bridges. Other notable incidents include the $36 million stolen from Humanity Protocol on June 8 — linked to alleged North Korean hackers according to firm Quantstamp — and the $10.7 million extracted from THORChain on May 15.
AI Has Been Essential for Hackers
The debate over the role of artificial intelligence in the deterioration of crypto security gained momentum during the quarter. Mitchell Amador, CEO of bug bounty platform Immunefi, stated that the proliferation of new artificial intelligence models tilted the playing field in favor of attackers, generating what he described as a “vulnerability apocalypse” that explains the sustained resurgence of exploits.
