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DeFi TVL Drops $45B YTD on Exploits and Price Crash
DeFi TVL dropped $45B since January, hit by 121 hacks ($942M) and a 50% market cap fall. Only Tron and Hyperliquid grew. Aave lost $12B in deposits.
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DeFi protocols have shed roughly $45 billion in total value locked since January, sliding from about $115 billion to around $70 billion as of late June, according to on-chain analytics firm CryptoRank. The decline has been steady: TVL fell every single month this year.
Among the ten largest blockchains by TVL, only Tron (TRX) and Hyperliquid (HYPE) posted positive growth. Tron gained about 5%, largely due to its role in USDT transfers and stablecoin settlement. Hyperliquid rose roughly 7%, driven by its position as the leading venue for on-chain perpetual futures trading.
The biggest loser among top-ten chains was Arbitrum, which dropped 55.3% to $1.3 billion in TVL. Ethereum, still the largest DeFi chain at $38.9 billion, fell 43% year-to-date. Solana declined 40.5% to $4.93 billion.
CryptoRank attributed the outflows to a record string of hacks that have hit the market this year. The crypto industry recorded 121 hacks in 2026 through late June, with combined losses reaching approximately $942 million. The second quarter alone accounted for 85 of those incidents and roughly $775 million in stolen funds, Cryptopolitan reported.
In Q2, KelpDAO lost $293 million through a LayerZero cross-chain bridge vulnerability, and Drift Protocol suffered a $280 million breach, according to the report. The KelpDAO attack also hit Aave (AAVE). Attackers used stolen, unbacked rsETH tokens as collateral on Aave to borrow against them, leaving the lending protocol with bad debt. In the days following the exploit, Aave’s TVL dropped from $26.4 billion to $14.3 billion, a 46% decline, as depositors pulled funds. The KelpDAO and Drift Protocol exploits alone accounted for three-quarters of Q2’s total losses. Aave’s TVL has not recovered since, remaining around $14.3 billion through late June.
The TVL outflows tracked the broader crypto price corrections. Bitcoin hit an all-time high above $122,000 in October 2025, with the total crypto market capitalization peaking at $4.21 trillion. At the time of writing, the crypto market sits at a $2.15 trillion capitalization, nearly a 50% drop from the peak. BTC is down over 28% year-to-date. ETH has declined 43%. BNB is down 33%, and SOL has fallen 43.5%.
For more context on the broader market, see our crypto market analysis.