Crypto hacks hit $1.25 billion in the third quarter, the most since early 2025; two cases were 56% of it

Crypto platforms lost about $1.25 billion to hacks and exploits in the third quarter of 2026, according to our tally of the DefiLlama hacks database, which logged 119 incidents between July 1 and Sept. 30. That is the largest quarterly total since the first quarter of 2025 and more than seven times the $168 million recorded in the first quarter of this year. CoinDesk put the quarter at $1.26 billion; the database updates as incidents are added and revised.

The fourth quarter started the same way. NEAR Intents, a cross-chain trading system, lost about $3.8 million on Thursday to a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with its smart contract, CoinDesk reported. The project said the flaw was patched and that it will reimburse affected users in full.

The number behind the number: two incidents, most of the money

A $1.25 billion quarter sounds like a broad wave of attacks. The database says otherwise. The two largest cases account for about 56% of the total, and the typical incident is small.

The median loss across all 119 incidents was about $580,000, and 77 of them were under $1 million. Only one third-quarter case in the database records any returned funds, about $90,750.

How the money was taken

Grouped by DefiLlama's own classifications, compromised private keys accounted for about $591 million, or 47% of the quarter's losses. Bridge and cross-chain failures took another $343 million, or 27%. Accounting and arithmetic flaws in token contracts added $195 million. Classic smart contract bugs such as reentrancy were close to zero. In other words, most of the dollars were lost to how platforms guard their keys and move assets between chains, not to clever attacks on code.

2026 is closing in on last year's total. Losses logged so far in 2026 total about $2.24 billion, against about $2.71 billion for all of 2025. The second and third quarters alone account for about $2.07 billion of this year's figure.

Who it actually hits

A trader holding coins on an exchange is exposed to the largest category on that list: a hot wallet whose keys get stolen. Bitget's case shows how that plays out in practice. Withdrawals were paused for days, and the exchange's promise to make users whole rests on a protection fund held in 5,500 bitcoin, so its value moves with the bitcoin price. We tracked that in our Bitget coverage. Users of bridges and cross-chain tools carry the second-largest risk, which is the category NEAR Intents fell into on Thursday.

The losses came in a quarter when prices rose sharply. On Coinbase daily closes, bitcoin rose 42.8% between June 30 and Sept. 30 and ether rose 71.0%. Higher prices make every stolen token worth more in dollar terms, which is one reason dollar losses can climb even when the number of attacks barely changes: the database logged 119 incidents in the third quarter against 114 in the second. Today's prices are in our daily crypto report and on /crypto-prices.

Sources: DefiLlama hacks database; CoinDesk; Coinbase Exchange market data. Quarterly totals, shares by classification and the median are Chronicle calculations from DefiLlama data as of Oct. 1, 2026, and will change if the database is revised. This is market information, not investment advice.