Crypto Hacks Rose 96% in March as Losses Hit $52M

March’s $52 million in losses was dangerous sufficient, however April has opened with a single incident that resulted within the theft of $285 million.

A report from blockchain safety agency Peckshield reveals that crypto hacks rose 96% in March 2026, with scammers stealing about $52 million in main incidents.

It added {that a} new development known as the “shadow contagion” can be spreading the consequences of those assaults to different DeFi platforms, which means that protocols that aren’t affected need to cope with dangerous debt in consequence.

Crypto Hacks Are Inflicting Ripple Impact

PeckShield identified 20 separate crypto exploits in March 2026, with the $52 million the trade collectively misplaced in these incidents being nearly double the $26.5 million it says was stolen in February.

The platform added that these assaults are actually triggering what consultants name “shadow contagion” past the preliminary losses. Safety researchers have famous that exploits are now not behaving like remoted incidents. As an alternative, a single breach is making a ripple impact that destabilizes lending markets, drains liquidity swimming pools, and creates dangerous debt for protocols that weren’t straight compromised.

In its X publish, PeckShield mentioned that March’s largest safety incident reveals how this occurs. Final month, attackers hacked ResolvLabs by exploiting a vulnerability in its AWS key administration system that allow them mint 80 million USR tokens. The breach triggered direct losses of round $25 million and triggered dangerous debt throughout a number of different protocols like Morphoblue, Euler, and Fluid.

In the identical manner, a hacker bypassed the Thena (THE) market’s provide cap on Venus Protocol, inflated a collateral place to greater than thrice the meant restrict, and borrowed almost $15 million in belongings. Whereas preliminary reviews framed the incident as a $3.7 million exploit, on-chain investigations present the attacker ended up losing over $4 million whereas creating $2.18 million in dangerous debt.

Different main exploits that occurred throughout the interval embrace assaults on people, with one, a $24 million heist of crypto belonging to on-line persona Sillytuna, involving bodily coercion and sensible contract manipulation, and one other, the theft of $18 million value of ETH from a whale on Kraken, on account of social engineering. On-chain knowledge reveals that the Kraken person had initially acquired 8,662 ETH, with the legal having access to their pockets and bridging $1.7 million value of ETH by means of Thorchain and placing a further 5,347.9 ETH into the HitBTC platform.

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April Opens With $285 Million Loss

Elsewhere, knowledge from safety researcher Jussy shows extra exploits of DeFi platforms like Cyrus Finance, which suffered a $5 million flashloan pool shares exploit on March 22, in addition to Solv, a reserve protocol on the Bitcoin community, which misplaced $2.7 million on March 5.

In the meantime, April began on a disastrous footing when a scheme hatched in March resulted within the lack of about $285 million from Drift Protocol, a perpetual futures trade on Solana. Within the aftermath of the incident, blockchain investigator ZachXBT called out stablecoin issuer Circle over perceived inaction because the attacker bridged hundreds of thousands in USDC from Solana to Ethereum throughout what he claimed had been about 100 transactions.