April crypto hacks top $600 million; KelpDAO and Drift each hit for more than $280 million

BlockBeats reported on April 19 that April is shaping up as one of the cryptocurrency industry's worst months for hacking losses. At least 13 protocols and platforms have been attacked in incidents of varying size, with total losses now exceeding $600 million. Two of the largest cases involved Drift and KelpDAO, each suffering losses above $280 million. Investigators have linked several major attacks to North Korea-connected hacking groups. Key incidents include: - April 1: Drift Protocol, Solana's largest decentralized perpetuals trading platform, was hacked for about $285 million. On-chain preparation began March 11 after the attacker withdrew 10 ETH from Tornado Cash and unfolded over nearly three weeks. The exploit itself took 12 minutes, and most funds were bridged to Ethereum within hours via Circle's CCTP. The breach ranks as Solana's second-largest security incident, behind the 2022 Wormhole cross-chain bridge exploit that lost $326 million. - April 13: Cross-chain interoperability protocol Hyperbridge was exploited through a flaw in cross-chain proof verification, with losses of roughly $2.5 million. - April 16: NEAR-ecosystem lending protocol Rhea Finance was attacked, with total losses of $18.4 million. The same day, Russia-related trading platform Grinex was also compromised, losing about $15 million. - April 18: Ethereum liquid staking protocol Kelp DAO was breached, leading to the theft of about 116,500 rsETH valued near $292 million, around 18% of rsETH's circulating supply. The attacker allegedly forged cross-chain messages to deceive the lzReceive function in LayerZero's EndpointV2 contract into releasing bridge reserves. The incident has now eclipsed Drift as the largest DeFi hack of 2026 so far.