Crypto projects suffered a record number of hacks in the first half of 2026, but security firms disagree sharply on how much money was stolen.
TRM Labs counted 207 incidents and roughly $972 million lost. Blockaid verified 212 incidents and put losses above $1.1 billion. CertiK counted 344 incidents totalling $1.315 billion, while Onchain Lens recorded 224 incidents and about $1.32 billion. The highest estimate is roughly 35 percent above the lowest, and the incident counts differ by a factor of more than 1.6.
The gap matters because the same six months are being described two ways. Under TRM’s numbers, losses fell to under a billion. Under CertiK’s, they are a third higher than that. Anyone citing a single figure is picking a methodology, whether or not they say so.
The trackers agree on the shape of the problem. Two April breaches dominate. The KelpDAO exploit cost roughly $292 million and the Drift Protocol incident about $285 million, together nearly $577 million. CertiK’s chief executive, Ronghui Gu, said both were failures of operational and infrastructure security rather than code vulnerabilities, and that “a huge share of H1’s damage came down to just two incidents”.
Blockaid attributed both breaches to actors linked to North Korea. TRM has put North Korea-linked groups at around 66 percent of total losses for the half. Neither company responded to the incidents in material available for this report.
The comparison with 2025 is also less flattering than it looks. Losses that year were inflated by the single Bybit breach, which alone accounted for about $1.5 billion. Strip that out and the underlying trend is worse, not better.
TRM found that infrastructure and operational compromises made up about 15 percent of incidents but roughly 76 percent of losses, with a growing volume of smaller smart contract exploits driving the rise in raw incident count.
The pattern points at people rather than code. Blockaid described social engineering on LinkedIn leading to compromised multisignature signers as a working method behind two of the four largest incidents of the half.
