Crypto Hacks Hit $1.1 Billion in Record H1 2026, With Ethereum and Solana Hit Hardest

$1.1 billion. That’s how much crypto hacking cost the industry in just the first half of 2026, the worst six-month stretch on record by number of incidents, according to a new report from security firm Blockaid.

Ethereum and Solana absorbed the largest share of losses between them, but through very different attack methods. Ethereum’s incidents were driven mostly by code exploits — flaws in smart contracts themselves. Solana’s losses, by contrast, were mostly tied to breaches of private keys and signing infrastructure, a fundamentally different weak point than a bug in the code.

That distinction matters for anyone building or using either ecosystem: an Ethereum-focused security review that only audits smart contract code wouldn’t have caught Solana’s dominant attack pattern, and vice versa. The two networks effectively have different primary threat models right now.

North Korea-linked hacking groups, particularly the Lazarus Group’s TraderTraitor subgroup, accounted for roughly 55% of total H1 losses on their own, with the KelpDAO, Drift Protocol, and Humanity Protocol exploits together totaling around $609 million. Blockaid also noted that high-threshold exploits, its term for the most severe incidents, occurred 3.4 times more often in just the first half of 2026 than across all of 2025 combined.

That last figure is the real headline: this isn’t simply more small incidents adding up. The frequency of the most serious attacks is accelerating sharply, even as the industry’s security tooling and awareness have also matured considerably since 2025.

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