H1 2026: Crypto Lost $1B to Hackers, and Ethereum & Solana Wrote the Receipts 🧾

Crypto losses topped $1 billion in the first half of 2026 as the industry logged its highest number of hacks in any six-month stretch, according to onchain security platform Blockaid's H1 2026 security report released Tuesday. Blockaid tracked 212 security incidents during the period, with Ethereum and Solana absorbing the heaviest damage at roughly $332 million and $326 million in stolen funds, respectively. The largest single exploit came from KelpDAO at $292 million, and Blockaid verified 3.4 times as many high-threshold exploits in H1 2026 as across all of 2025.

Ethereum's losses were driven primarily by code exploits, with major incidents also tied to key compromises involving Humanity Protocol and StablR. CoWSwap, an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange, was the only major Ethereum incident classified by the report as a user mistake. Blockaid identified recurring attack vectors on the network, including bugs in bridges and smart contracts, unauthorized access to privileged accounts and market manipulation techniques, noting that Ethereum remains a top target because it hosts many of crypto's most valuable applications, including restaking platforms, stablecoins and decentralized exchanges.

Solana's $326 million in losses marked a sharp jump from the roughly $127 million the network recorded across all of 2025. Unlike Ethereum, compromised keys accounted for more than 98% of Solana's losses, driven largely by incidents at Drift Protocol and Step Finance, which Blockaid linked to North Korea-linked cyber groups. A small number of code exploits involving Raydium and Volo accounted for the rest. Blockaid CEO Ido Ben-Natan told Cointelegraph that "2025 had $2.58 billion lost across 63 incidents, concentrated in Q1 by Bybit's $1.5 billion, with Ethereum and Arbitrum the top chains by stolen-fund flow."

The contrast in attack patterns between the two networks underscores a split in how adversaries are gaining ground: Ethereum hackers are still hunting for bugs in protocol code, while Solana attackers are increasingly going after signer infrastructure and organizational security. Blockaid's report arrives as the broader crypto industry continues to grapple with rising exploit frequency, with H1 2026 already outpacing the first half of any prior year on record.