A report from blockchain safety agency Peckshield exhibits that crypto hacks rose 96% in March 2026, with scammers stealing about $52 million in main incidents.
It added {that a} new development referred to as the “shadow contagion” can be spreading the results of those assaults to different DeFi platforms, which means that protocols that aren’t affected must take care of unhealthy debt in consequence.
Crypto Hacks Are Inflicting Ripple Impact
PeckShield recognized 20 separate crypto exploits in March 2026, with the $52 million the business 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 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 unhealthy debt for protocols that weren’t instantly compromised.
In its X put up, PeckShield mentioned that March’s largest safety incident exhibits 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 brought about direct losses of round $25 million and triggered unhealthy debt throughout a number of different protocols like Morphoblue, Euler, and Fluid.
In the identical means, a hacker bypassed the Thena (THE) market’s provide cap on Venus Protocol, inflated a collateral place to greater than 3 times the supposed restrict, and borrowed almost $15 million in belongings. Whereas preliminary experiences framed the incident as a $3.7 million exploit, on-chain investigations present the attacker ended up dropping over $4 million whereas creating $2.18 million in unhealthy debt.
Different main exploits that occurred through the interval embody assaults on people, with one, a $24 million heist of crypto belonging to on-line persona Sillytuna, involving bodily coercion and good contract manipulation, and one other, the theft of $18 million value of ETH from a whale on Kraken, resulting from social engineering. On-chain information exhibits that the Kraken person had initially acquired 8,662 ETH, with the prison getting access to their pockets and bridging $1.7 million value of ETH by way of Thorchain and placing a further 5,347.9 ETH into the HitBTC platform.
April Opens With $285 Million Loss
Elsewhere, information from safety researcher Jussy exhibits 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 change on Solana. Within the aftermath of the incident, blockchain investigator ZachXBT referred to as out stablecoin issuer Circle over perceived inaction because the attacker bridged thousands and thousands in USDC from Solana to Ethereum throughout what he claimed have been about 100 transactions.
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