Web3 is Going Just Great

With the keys, the attacker stole more than 6 million of Humanity's H token, then used other keys to upgrade a bridge and drain 141 million more tokens. With the bridge access, they also minted 300 million new H tokens. The attacker then quickly swapped the ill-gotten tokens for ETH, causing the H price to plummet by 80–90%.

Humanity Protocol markets itself as a competitor to Sam Altman's World (formerly Worldcoin), a decentralized identity project that aims to use iris scans to prove that users are unique humans. Humanity raised $20 million in 2025 from Pantera Capital and Jump Crypto.

Only about a quarter of them ever sold, leaving about 7,200 of them on the digital shelves. That is, until they were stolen (or, as the museum put it, "transferred from the wallet without authorization"). If valued at their sale price the stolen NFTs would be worth €13.32 million (US$15.3 million), though it's hard to argue the thief could've ever sold them for that amount given the museum had failed to do so for several years.

The stolen NFTs were soon made even less appealing to prospective buyers when the museum un-linked the image files from the digital assets, and OpenSea blocked them from trading.

The name led to some confusion due to the similarly named Squid Router, which is not related. It's not clear if the users who installed the module were aware that the two projects were separate.

Because Monero is a privacycoin, a type of cryptocurrency that obscures transaction details including sender and receiver wallets, it is not feasible to trace the stolen assets.

The company's bankruptcy filing reports between $10 million and $50 million in both assets and liabilities. In a recent financial disclosure, the company had reported a 49% year-over-year reduction in revenue and a net loss of $9.5 million for the year. The company had also suffered a $3.67 million hack in April.

Bitcoin Depot has blamed a challenging state-level regulatory environment for its bankruptcy, pointing to a series of regulatory restrictions and outright bans on crypto ATMs, which are a major conduit for crypto scams. An FBI report on Internet crime in 2024 showed 11,000 reports of fraud involving crypto ATMs – a 99% increase from the prior year. Almost $250 million was reported lost due to such scams, with a majority of it coming from victims over 60 years old. Several states have responded by introducing laws imposing strict compliance requirements or transaction limits on ATM operators, and Indiana and Tennessee have both recently banned the kiosks entirely. Additionally, the company is defending against lawsuits from both Massachusetts and Iowa, which argue that the company uses a misleading pricing structure, knowingly enables crypto scames, and maintains a predatory refund policy.

Verus halted the entire Verus network after the exploit was detected in hopes of limiting further damage.

The exploiter later accepted a bounty offer by Verus, returning 4,052 ETH (~$8.5 million) while keeping the remaining ~25% as a "bounty".

Transit was previously exploited in 2022 for $21 million, although around 70% of the stolen assets were later returned.

The project has announced they intend to "restor[e] bridge liquidity through a legally structured sale of Foundation's TAC token treasury reserves."

Blockchain research firm Blockaid has linked the attacker to a similar exploit in March 2025 that saw $5 million drained from 1inch. This time, 1inch has asserted that although they use TrustedVolumes as a resolver, the exploit did not involve any of their systems.

Polish authorities have launched investigations into the apparent collapse. Losses have been estimated at 350 million zł (~$96 million).

Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk has also recently accused Zondacrypto of sponsoring conservative and right-wing politicians, including Polish President Karol Nawrocki. Nawrocki has repeatedly vetoed legislation aiming to regulate the crypto sector, describing it as overly burdensome to crypto businesses. Tusk has also alleged that Zondacrypto was funded by the Russian mafia and Russian intelligence services. These allegations are also being investigated by Polish authorities, and one report citing the country's Internal Security Agency claims that the Kremlin-linked Tambovskaya Bratva Russian mafia group took over the exchange as far back as 2018.

Volo says they have frozen or recovered all but around $60,000. They have also said they are "prepared to absorb this loss", rather than passing losses along to their users.

Aave maintains a $50 million insurance fund to absorb bad debt. However, this can't cover such a huge shortfall.

RaveDAO describes itself as a "community-driven global rave powerhouse", and sells NFT tickets to rave events.

RaveDAO has denied any responsibility for the recent price movements, but did not address allegations of enormous token concentration with the project's team or large transfers to exchanges around the time of the price jump.

When tokens are bridged from one chain to another, the tokens on the original chain are locked in the bridge smart contract while the token is used on the other chain, preventing its owner from double-spending the asset. With 116,500 locked rsETH now stolen, those using the token on other blockchains are now holding possibly unbacked tokens.

The rush for holders to offload their dubiously backed tokens is likely to worsen contagion throughout defi protocols, where those platforms could be left holding the bag. Some platforms, including Aave, Lido Finance, and Ethena, have paused markets involving rsETH to try to protect themselves.

This hack has set the new record for the largest defi hack in 2026, following the $285 million Drift exploit on April 1.

Some of the stolen tokens were returned by the attacker to the protocol, and around $4.35 million USDT were frozen by its issuer, Tether. Altogether, around $10 million was recovered, leaving $8.4 million outstanding.

According to blockchain intelligence firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis, Grinex is a rebranded version of the Garantex cryptocurrency exchange that was shut down and sanctioned in March 2025. Two of its operators were subsequently criminally charged in the US.

One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: "I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant." According to him, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000).

Crypto sleuth zachxbt traced some of the stolen funds through Kucoin, a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange that was recently fined and forced to exit US markets over licensing and anti-money laundering failures. "The three largest victims lost seven figures each," he wrote.

Apple removed the malicious app from their App Store on April 13, six days after it had been added.

The following day, a Hyperbridge developer posted a screenshot of a blockchain transaction, writing "Lmao the uniBTC exploiter is testing Hyperbridge. I hope you have a quantum computer bro". Another commenter replied, "Rule #1 dont actively provoke attackers".

About two weeks later, an attacker was able to forge a transaction to change the admin rights for the Polkadot/Ethereum bridge contract, allowing them to mint 1 billion DOT tokens. They were able to cash out about $2,500,000 due to limited liquidity.

The April Fools' posts have since been deleted.

Bitcoin Depot is the largest operator of crypto ATMs globally and in the United States, with approximately 8,700 kiosks in the US and 9,200 worldwide.

The project later described the exploit as "a novel attack involving durable nonces, resulting in a rapid takeover of Drift's Security Council administrative powers." Once the attacker had access to admin capabilities, they quickly eliminated risk management limits on the protocol and drained huge quantities of tokens, which they swapped to USDC and then ETH. The attack was attributed to extremely sophisticated social engineering, likely by North Korean hackers.

Some have criticized USDC's issuer, Circle, for not freezing the stolen funds during the six hours they were held in USDC. Unlike ETH, USDC is controlled by a centralized company that can, and regularly does, freeze assets determined to have been stolen or connected to illicit activity.

The theft is among the largest in defi history.

Ultimately, facing being outvoted, the attacker dumped their MFAM holdings and the proposal was canceled as their balance had fallen below the proposal threshold.

This was only the most recent of Moonwell's troubles after the protocol suffered a $1.78 million loss in February due to an oracle misconfiguration and a $3.7 million loss in November 2025.

Balancer co-founder Fernando Martinelli has said he strongly considered shutting down the protocol entirely, but ultimately decided to continue the project as it generates a relatively small amount of revenue. Instead, the project will move to being operated by a DAO and operating company, which Martinelli hopes will allow them to dodge "real and ongoing legal exposure" and "the liability of past security incidents".

Although another Balancer co-founder has optimistically presented this as "the start of a better chapter" for Balancer, it remains to be seen whether a skeleton crew will be able to revive the project.

An exploiter took advantage of a flaw in USR's minting code to create tens of millions of USR tokens without depositing any assets to back them. The attacker then sold the unbacked USR, crashing the stablecoin's price to as low as $0.14. The attacker has profited at least 11,400 ETH (~$24 million), though they are still selling.

Some defi protocols paused USR-exposed strategies to avoid downstream impacts. Resolv issued a statement that the token's collateral pool was unaffected, though this is likely little comfort for those who purchased the unbacked USR.

While the exploit left the Venus Protocol with over $2 million in bad debt, it's not clear if the attacker even made money from the exploit. The exploiter's position was ultimately liquidated, collapsing the increase in THE price. However, it's possible the exploiter took advantage of the price discrepancy elsewhere to profit.

The Venus Protocol has had a number of issues in the past — notably in June 2023, when the team developing the BNB Chain had to intervene when the a thief borrowed $150 million on Venus against stolen tokens and then faced liquidation.

BlockFills was backed by investors including Susquehanna and CME Ventures.

The Aave founder offered to refund the user the $600,000 in fees collected from the transaction, and acknowledged "there are additional guardrails the industry can build to better protect users".

Chaos Labs, presumably embarrassed to have lived up to its name, promised to reimburse users whose positions were improperly liquidated.

According to Gondi, the exploiter took advantage of functionality that allowed users to sell their NFTs to automatically repay loans.

Gondi has said it has reimbursed customers by buying them "comparable items" from the same collections as their stolen NFTs, although it seems questionable that this will satisfy customers who purchased products whose whole selling point is that they aren't interchangeable.

The blunder was likely due to the authorities' lack of knowledge about cryptocurrency. The move was somewhat akin to authorities publicly posting a username and password for a criminal's bank account — though that would likely be an easier mistake to unwind.

According to Step Finance, "we explored every possible path forward, including financing and acquisition opportunities. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure a viable outcome and have made the difficult decision to end all operations effective immediately."

In reply to Step Finance's announcement, crypto investor Mike Dudas claimed that the project had contacted him about bridge financing, but that Step had never responded to his request for more information about the hack. "i responded: 'would need to see the security post mortem before i could consider investing here' <crickets>"

The attacker was able to manipulate the oracle price to show that USTRY was priced at $100 (rather than its actual trading price of around $1.05). Then, they borrowed against the overvalued asset, withdrawing XLM and USDC priced at $10.2 million. However, around 48 million of the stolen XLM (~$7.2 million) were frozen.

Blockchain security researcher Specter has suggested there may be links between this attack and a $50 million theft from the Infini "stablecoin neobank" a year ago.

On February 19, the office announced they had recovered the stolen assets and identified the thief.

This is the second time Moonwell has suffered a loss thanks to an oracle misconfiguration. In November 2025, the platform was left with almost $3.7 million in bad debt after a different asset was mispriced.

Although the vulnerable pull requests were at least partially developed by an AI tool, the security auditor who initially attributed the vulnerability to Claude Opus 4.6 later softened his criticism, noting that even senior developers could have made the same mistake. He did, however, criticize the project for a lack of sufficiently rigorous testing that should have caught the issue.

Platforms limiting or halting withdrawals — particularly lending platforms — is reminiscient of the 2022 crypto crash, when falling crypto prices exposed crypto firms that had been engaging in highly risky or sometimes illegal behavior. As crypto prices fell, firms were unable to meet their loan obligations or faced margin calls, and the tightly interconnected web of lending within the crypto ecosystem often meant that one company failure cascaded into multiple more. It remains to be seen whether this is an isolated incident or the beginning of a trend as crypto prices hit revisit price lows not seen in over a year.

BlockFills claims to have more than 2,000 institutional clients globally, and boasted of facilitating more than $61 billion in transactions in 2025. The company's backers include Susquehanna Capital and CME Ventures.

The exchange announced that they had recovered 99.7% of the erroneously awarded tokens, leaving around 1,860 BTC (~$130 million) unaccounted for.

The incident has drawn further scrutiny from Korean regulators, who said that the error "has exposed the vulnerabilities and risks of virtual assets." Regulatory agencies in the country had already been cracking down on crypto firms following a $30 million hack of the Upbit crypto exchange in November 2025.

As many companies do these days, the Winklevosses tried to pin the layoffs on AI, claiming that the engineers using AI are ten times more productive. "A smaller organization, leveraging the right tools, isn't just more efficient, it's actually faster," they wrote — in a blog post that itself reeks of AI.

CrossCurve took a conciliatory tone in on-chain messages sent to the thief, writing, "These tokens were wrongfully taken from users due to a smart contract exploit. We do not believe this was intentional on your part, and there is no indication of malicious intent." (Who among us hasn't accidentally stolen millions of dollars?) However, they warned, they planned to escalate to working with law enforcement and blockchain security firms to investigate and prosecute the theft if the funds were not returned within 72 hours.

Aperture has said they disabled portions of their web app impacted by the bug, and are working to try to trace and recover stolen funds.