hackeralert

Another week. Another massive hack. And this one should concern everyone — not just DeFi users. 🚨
The $290 million KelpDAO exploit has sent negative sentiment across the entire crypto market, with DeFi tokens morpho and aave leading losses of 4.6% and 2.8% respectively. (EvergreenFeed Blog)
Here's what happened, why it matters, and what you need to do right now 👇
What is KelpDAO?
KelpDAO is a liquid restaking protocol built on top of EigenLayer — one of the most hyped infrastructure projects in DeFi. It lets users deposit ETH, get yield, AND use their staked assets as collateral elsewhere simultaneously. Sounds powerful. And it is — which is exactly what made it a target.
The brutal reality of DeFi security:
In 2025 alone, over $2.2 billion was lost to hacks across DeFi protocols. KelpDAO just added $290 million to 2026's running total. The pattern is always the same:
🔴 Complex smart contract = complex attack surface
🔴 TVL grows fast = hackers pay attention
🔴 Audit ≠ hack-proof
🔴 No insurance = users bear 100% of the loss
What you should do RIGHT NOW:
✅ Review any funds you have in liquid restaking protocols
✅ Never keep more in DeFi than you can afford to lose entirely
✅ Check if your protocol has a bug bounty program and when its last audit was
✅ Diversify — one protocol, one point of failure
✅ Use hardware wallets for long-term holdings — keep DeFi exposure separate
The bigger picture:
Hacks like this are why institutional adoption moves slowly. BlackRock and Morgan Stanley aren't putting client money into protocols that can disappear overnight. Until DeFi security matures — and it is improving — size your positions accordingly.
This isn't fear. It's risk management. The best traders in crypto aren't the ones chasing the highest yields. They're the ones still in the game after events like this.
💬 Do you use liquid restaking protocols? How are you managing the risk? 👇
#KelpDAO #defi #CryptoSecurity #HackerAlert #RiskManagement $BTC

A series of recent attacks on Drift and Kelp shows that the market is facing not just isolated hacks, but a sustained campaign against DeFi infrastructure. In just over two weeks, more than $500 million has been drained from the sector. And as time goes on, it’s becoming clearer that the hackers' target isn’t just individual protocols, but the very interconnectedness of the crypto market.

Over the last decade, hackers have siphoned off more than $17 billion from the crypto market— and the main culprit behind these losses isn't the vulnerability of smart contracts, but the compromise of private keys. This data was published by the DefiLlama platform, which has documented 518 incidents over the past ten years.

🚨⚠️WARNING⚠️

THE BIGGEST DEFI EXPLOIT IN 2026 HAS JUST HAPPENED

💥And $AAVE , the protocol that everyone considered SECURE, got caught in the middle and its token suffered a DROP of 20%. It wasn't a hack on Aave. But the damage is real.

👉On Saturday, April 18, an attacker exploited the cross-chain bridge of Kelp DAO, a liquid restaking protocol for ETH.
🔻The attacker forged a message and drained 116.500 rsETH (the liquid restaking token of Kelp) from the bridge contracts.
🔻Value at the time of the attack: $292 million. 18% of the entire circulating supply of the token.

Over the past three months, there have been more than 50 major hacks involving the theft of digital assets
Since the beginning of 2026, hackers have stolen approximately $165 million worth of cryptocurrency. A total of 51 major hacks have been reported, according to data from the analytics service PeckShield.
In March, there were 20 major hacking attacks totaling $52 million. Among the largest incidents were the $25.3 million hack of the Resolv crypto protocol and the theft of nearly $18.2 million from a Kraken user as a result of a targeted attack using social engineering techniques.
The Resolv hack was linked to a vulnerability in the key management system, which allowed the creation of unsecured tokens. Following this, the price of the project’s USR stablecoin plummeted by approximately 80%, triggering a chain reaction of losses across several DeFi protocols, including Morpho, Euler, and Fluid.
The total also includes $24 million stolen during an armed attack on a user named Sillytuna. This account has been active since June 2008; journalists link it to a long-time entrepreneur in the non-fungible token (NFT) and gaming sectors who used this pseudonym on several platforms.
In February, PeckShield analysts recorded 15 hacks totaling $26.5 million. The YieldBlox.finance project lost $10 million. A hack of the IoTeX blockchain bridge resulted in a loss of $8.8 million. The decentralized financial service CrossCurve lost $3 million.
In January, analysts were aware of 16 incidents totaling just over $86 million. The largest amount of cryptocurrency was lost during the StepFinance protocol hack ($28.9 million). The TrueBit project lost $26.4 million. The SwapNet service lost $13.3 million in cryptocurrency.
The StepFinance project announced its closure shortly after the hack. Its partner projects were also forced to cease operations: SolanaFloor, a media resource focused on the Solana ecosystem, and the tokenization platform Remora Markets.
Earlier, PeckShield reported that by the end of 2025, hackers and scammers had stolen $4 billion in cryptocurrency. Of this amount, $2.67 billion were losses from hacks, the most serious of which cost the Bybit exchange $1.4 billion. To date, it has managed to recover less than 10% of the stolen funds.
#HackerAlert