Crypto Hacks Top $1 Billion as Market Awaits Fed Decision

The cryptocurrency market is navigating a turbulent mid-year crossroad, balancing a record wave of security breaches surpassing $1 billion in losses against a cautiously optimistic technical setup for major assets ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision.

A report published by blockchain security firm Blockaid found that crypto projects lost roughly $1.1 billion to exploits in the first half of 2026, exceeding its full-year total for 2025 and marking the highest number of hacks recorded in any half-year period.

Operational failures eclipsed code bugs as the primary attack vector, with attackers increasingly targeting private keys, signer infrastructure, and backend systems rather than exploiting faulty code. This shift reduces the protection offered by code audits alone, making key management and transaction authorization processes crucial for institutions exploring tokenized assets and onchain settlement.

The largest incidents were linked to North Korean state-sponsored actors, with $292 million lost in the KelpDAO exploit and $285 million lost in the Drift Protocol exploit. The KelpDAO attack utilized a LinkedIn-based social engineering campaign that compromised internal RPC nodes to falsify a source-chain message, tricking a bridge contract on Ethereum into releasing 116,500 rsETH.

Ethereum-based projects suffered the highest losses at $332 million, while Solana-based projects accounted for $326 million in losses. The attack vectors differed starkly, with more than 98% of Solana losses stemming from compromised keys and signing infrastructure rather than smart contract bugs.