The cryptocurrency industry has lost over $600 million in April, with KelpDAO and Drift hacks both exceeding $280 million.
BlockBeats News, April 19th. This month has become one of the most devastating months for the cryptocurrency industry in terms of losses due to hacker attacks. Currently, at least 13 crypto protocols and platforms have been attacked to varying degrees, with total losses exceeding $600 million. The Drift and KelpDAO incidents alone accounted for over $280 million in losses, and several major incidents have been traced back to a North Korea-affiliated hacker group. The key events include:
On April 1st, Solana's largest decentralized perpetual contract trading platform, Drift Protocol, was hacked for approximately $285 million. The on-chain activity started from March 11th when the attacker withdrew 10 ETH from Tornado Cash and lasted for nearly 3 weeks. The actual exploitation on April 1st took around 12 minutes, with most of the funds cross-chain transferred to Ethereum via Circle CCTP within a few hours. This incident marked the second-largest security event in Solana's history, following only the $326 million Wormhole cross-chain bridge incident in 2022.
On April 13th, the blockchain interoperability protocol Hyperbridge was attacked due to a cross-chain proof verification vulnerability, resulting in a loss of approximately $2.5 million. On April 16th, the NEAR ecosystem lending protocol Rhea Finance was attacked, with a total loss of $18.4 million. Also on April 16th, the Russia-related exchange platform Grinex was attacked, resulting in a loss of around $15 million.
On April 18th, the Ethereum liquidity rehypothecation protocol Kelp DAO was attacked, with approximately 116,500 rsETH (worth around $292 million, accounting for about 18% of rsETH's circulation) stolen. The attacker used fake cross-chain messages to trick the LayerZero EndpointV2 contract's lzReceive function into releasing the on-bridge reserves. This event has surpassed Drift to become the largest DeFi hack event of 2026.
