A report from blockchain security firm Peckshield shows that crypto hacks rose 96% in March 2026, with scammers stealing about $52 million in major incidents.
It added that a new trend called the “shadow contagion” is also spreading the effects of these attacks to other DeFi platforms, meaning that protocols that aren’t affected have to deal with bad debt as a result.
Crypto Hacks Are Causing Ripple Effect
PeckShield identified 20 separate crypto exploits in March 2026, with the $52 million the industry collectively lost in those incidents being almost double the $26.5 million it says was stolen in February.
The platform added that these attacks are now triggering what experts call “shadow contagion” beyond the initial losses. Security researchers have noted that exploits are no longer behaving like isolated incidents. Instead, a single breach is creating a ripple effect that destabilizes lending markets, drains liquidity pools, and creates bad debt for protocols that were not directly compromised.
In its X post, PeckShield said that March’s largest security incident shows how this happens. Last month, attackers hacked ResolvLabs by exploiting a vulnerability in its AWS key management system that let them mint 80 million USR tokens. The breach caused direct losses of around $25 million and triggered bad debt across several other protocols like Morphoblue, Euler, and Fluid.
In the same way, a hacker bypassed the Thena (THE) market’s supply cap on Venus Protocol, inflated a collateral position to more than three times the intended limit, and borrowed nearly $15 million in assets. While initial reports framed the incident as a $3.7 million exploit, on-chain investigations show the attacker ended up losing over $4 million while creating $2.18 million in bad debt.
Other major exploits that occurred during the period include attacks on individuals, with one, a $24 million heist of crypto belonging to online personality Sillytuna, involving physical coercion and smart contract manipulation, and another, the theft of $18 million worth of ETH from a whale on Kraken, due to social engineering. On-chain data shows that the Kraken user had initially acquired 8,662 ETH, with the criminal gaining access to their wallet and bridging $1.7 million worth of ETH through Thorchain and putting an additional 5,347.9 ETH into the HitBTC platform.
April Opens With $285 Million Loss
Elsewhere, data from security researcher Jussy shows additional exploits of DeFi platforms like Cyrus Finance, which suffered a $5 million flashloan pool shares exploit on March 22, as well as Solv, a reserve protocol on the Bitcoin network, which lost $2.7 million on March 5.
Meanwhile, April started on a disastrous footing when a scheme hatched in March resulted in the loss of about $285 million from Drift Protocol, a perpetual futures exchange on Solana. In the aftermath of the incident, blockchain investigator ZachXBT called out stablecoin issuer Circle over perceived inaction as the attacker bridged millions in USDC from Solana to Ethereum across what he claimed were about 100 transactions.
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