Crypto losses hit $1 billion (roughly Rs. 9,566 crore) during the first half of 2026 as the sector witnessed its highest tally of hacks within six months, claims on-chain security platform Blockaid. The two blockchain networks, Ethereum and Solana, experienced the biggest impact of attacks on their systems, where the value lost was worth around $332 million (roughly Rs. 3,176 crore) and $326 million (roughly Rs. 3,119 crore), respectively, according to Blockaid’s Q2 2026 report on security. While code exploitation was the cause of Ethereum attacks, keys and signing infrastructure breaches were the reason behind Solana losses.
Code Exploits and Compromised Keys Drove Most Blockchain Losses
The biggest losses occurred in Ethereum due to incidents reported in H1 2026, with attackers mostly targeting vulnerabilities in applications built on blockchain technology. According to Blockaid, code exploitation was the most common cause of incidents on Ethereum, along with significant losses from key compromises at Humanity Protocol and StablR. The only major Ethereum attack in the report that involved user error was CoWSwap.
Some commonly used attack vectors on Ethereum were highlighted by Blockaid, including bridge and smart contract vulnerabilities, privilege account exploitation, and market manipulation. According to the report, the reason Ethereum is heavily targeted is that the platform hosts some of the most valuable use cases in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, including staking solutions and decentralised exchanges.
Compromised keys were responsible for more than 98 percent of Solana’s losses through cases such as those related to Drift Protocol and Step Finance, which were attributed to North Korean hacking groups by Blockaid. However, unlike the Ethereum network, where the hackers mainly exploited vulnerabilities in the protocol code, the Solana cases focused on attacking the signer infrastructure and organisational safety, whereas a few code exploits involving Raydium and Volo accounted for the rest of the losses.
Earlier this year, a report from market insights provider Unfolded, based on data from DefiLlama, stated that the second quarter of 2026 is already the most hacked quarter on record in terms of the number of attacks, with 83 hacks of crypto protocols. Exploits on bridges were the most common form of attack in this Q2, which saw $351 million (roughly Rs. 3,358 crore) worth of funds stolen by exploiting bridges.
