April Sees Significant Losses from Crypto Hacks

April has emerged as one of the most challenging months for the cryptocurrency industry due to hacking incidents. According to BlockBeats, at least 13 crypto protocols and platforms have been attacked, resulting in losses exceeding $600 million. Notably, the incidents involving Drift and KelpDAO each resulted in losses of over $280 million, with several major events traced back to North Korean hacker groups. On April 1, Solana's largest decentralized perpetual contract trading platform, Drift Protocol, was hacked, losing approximately $285 million. The attack was orchestrated over nearly three weeks, starting from March 11 when the attacker withdrew 10 ETH from Tornado Cash. The actual execution on April 1 took about 12 minutes, with most funds transferred to Ethereum via Circle CCTP within hours. This incident ranks as Solana's second-largest security breach, following the $326 million Wormhole cross-chain bridge event in 2022. On April 13, the blockchain interoperability protocol Hyperbridge was attacked due to a cross-chain proof verification vulnerability, resulting in a loss of around $2.5 million. On April 16, NEAR ecosystem lending protocol Rhea Finance was targeted, with total losses amounting to $18.4 million. Additionally, on April 16, the Russian-linked trading platform Grinex suffered an attack, losing approximately $15 million. On April 18, the Ethereum liquidity re-staking protocol Kelp DAO was hacked, with about 116,500 rsETH stolen. The attacker forged cross-chain messages to trick the LayerZero EndpointV2 contract's lzReceive function into releasing reserves from the bridge. This incident has surpassed Drift to become the largest DeFi hack of 2026 to date.