April 2026 became the most-hacked month in cryptocurrency history with 28-30 separate exploits stealing over $625 million, nearly quadrupling the $165 million lost across all of Q1 2026. Two massive incidents dominated the losses: Drift Protocol on Solana lost $285 million to a North Korea Lazarus Group social engineering attack on April 1, while KelpDAO lost $293 million around April 18 through a Layerzero bridge message spoofing exploit, together accounting for 93% of monthly losses. The attacks marked a shift from traditional smart contract bugs to social engineering and access-control failures targeting lending pools, vaults, staking contracts, oracles, and cross-chain bridges simultaneously. The KelpDAO hack triggered a crisis of confidence, with over $14 billion in total value locked fleeing DeFi protocols within days, concentrated in bridge and lending platforms.
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