Ethereum Leads $332M First-Half Hack Losses

Crypto News

Ethereum (ETH) recorded the largest chain-level loss total in the first half of 2026, with $332 million stolen from protocols on its network, according to blockchain-security research published July 28. The figure sat inside a broader crypto-wide toll that exceeded $1 billion across the six-month period, making the half one of the most active on record for verified attacks and pushing incident counts toward an all-time high. The total was still lower than the same period a year earlier, when a single $1.5 billion Bybit outflow had inflated the industry’s damage tally. North Korea-linked actors accounted for the biggest share of the latest losses, roughly $600 million, including a $285 million drain from Drift and a $292 million attack on KelpDAO. The researchers traced both campaigns to social-engineering operations that began on LinkedIn and ended with the compromise of multi-signature wallet signers. That method matters because a multi-signature setup is designed to require several independent approvals, so the failure point shifted from smart-contract code to the people and keys entrusted with control. For custodians and protocol teams, the findings turn attention toward signer identity, approval thresholds and real-time transaction monitoring, areas that often sit outside traditional code audits. Immunefi’s June ecosystem update counted 207 incidents and about $972 million in losses, while Quill Audits, focusing on DeFi, recorded 87 attacks and $935.3 million. The convergence among trackers suggests the record is not an artifact of one firm’s methodology, but a genuine rise in attempted and successful intrusions. It also shows that while headline dollar amounts have eased from prior peaks, the attack surface continues to widen across wallets, bridges and deployment pipelines, creating a broader altcoin security problem.

Ethereum’s $332 million loss total reflected a different risk profile from Solana’s $326 million, even though both networks were the hardest-hit chains in the half. The report described Ethereum as the home of many high-value protocols, including restaking systems, stablecoin contracts and decentralized-exchange aggregators, which makes it a natural target for large smart-contract exploits. Solana, by contrast, saw attackers focus less on contract logic and more on signature infrastructure, the layer that authorizes transactions and account access. That split suggests defenders must tailor controls to each chain’s architecture instead of applying a single audit checklist. It also found that two of the four largest thefts of the half followed the same LinkedIn-based social-engineering path, in which attackers persuaded or tricked multisig signers into ceding control. The report warned that current safeguards are not strong enough to stop that pattern, because identity verification, key custody and approval workflows often remain outside the scope of conventional smart-contract audits. For teams operating on Ethereum, that means hardware-key hygiene, signer rotation and transaction simulation may matter as much as formal code verification. The same research showed that DeFi losses have fallen 74% from the 2022 peak, a sign that repeated audits and bug-bounty programs have reduced the size of individual drains even as incident counts climb. The emerging pressure point is automated software. A $216,000 drain from Bankr was identified as the first known AI-agent-related case, and the report estimated blockchain AI deployment is expanding by roughly 10 times per year. In the second half, the researchers expect more incidents involving an AI crypto wallet or an AI trading bot, with prompt-injection attacks used to feed malicious instructions to agents, followed by tool abuse and unauthorized signing.

COINOTAG’s reading of these figures is that the security narrative is shifting from rare catastrophic code failures to frequent operational-security failures. The aggregate market backdrop remains cautious: our data puts the Fear and Greed Index at 29 out of 100, a fear reading, while Bitcoin dominance stands at 69.8% of a $1.853 trillion total crypto market capitalization. In that environment, Ethereum’s large loss total is less a referendum on the chain than a warning about where value and complex permissions concentrate. The primary-source record—the security report and on-chain transaction trails—shows the next defensive frontier is signer management, access control and AI-agent oversight.