Crypto hacks hit record 70 incidents in Q2 2026, $746M lost

The second quarter of 2026 set a record for crypto hacks: roughly 70 separate incidents, with combined losses of $746 million. That is double the previous quarterly record for number of attacks, though total dollar losses remain below past peaks.

April alone saw 30 hacks. The largest single breaches hit Drift Protocol and KelpDAO, according to security firms tracking the data. Code vulnerabilities and cross-chain bridge compromises drove most of the incidents, analysts said.

The pattern has shifted. Earlier quarters saw fewer but larger breaches. The current wave is more frequent and smaller in scale per incident, which changes how exchanges and custodians think about reserve coverage and withdrawal risk.

Security firms including CertiK and PeckShield are tracking whether the pace accelerates into the second half of the year. If the current rate holds, total hack losses for 2026 would exceed $1.2 billion, a threshold prediction markets already price as likely.

Regulatory responses remain uneven. Some jurisdictions are pushing mandatory proof-of-reserves audits; others have not addressed the shift toward smaller, more frequent attacks. The divergence matters for where liquidity pools and cross-chain bridges choose to domicile.

For traders, the takeaway is operational: the risk is no longer a single catastrophic event every six months. It is a steady drumbeat of smaller drains that erode liquidity in specific pools and tokens. Monitoring bridge activity and smart-contract upgrade schedules has become a weekly, not quarterly, discipline.