Crypto Losses Hit $480M in Early 2026: Certik

Highlights:

• Crypto losses have reached about $480 million toward the end of the first quarter.
• January alone accounted for $398.5 million across 42 incidents.
• Step Finance, Resolv, and Truebit each lost more than $25 million.

According to blockchain security firm CertiK, crypto losses have moved close to $500 million less than three months into 2026. CertiK tracked 103 security incidents and 36 phishing scams since January 1. Together, those incidents pushed first-quarter losses to about $480.4 million.

Overall, January drove most of the damage. CertiK logged $398.5 million in losses during the month across 42 incidents. By comparison, February losses fell to roughly $43.7 million, although the incident count rose to 50. March added another $38.3 million from 47 incidents, which brought the quarter total to 139 events.

The reduced monthly losses after January do not signal calmer conditions. Instead, large thefts gave way to a steady run of breaches, scams, and exploit-driven drains. The trend indicates that the pressure is distributed across multiple projects rather than a single collapse.

#CertiKInsight 🚨

Since January 1st, 2026, we have recorded 103 security incidents and 36 phishing scams, with an estimated total loss of ~$480M. pic.twitter.com/WaMMDLXgzM

— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) March 27, 2026

Major Breaches Hit Platforms Across Several Chains

Overall, several of the biggest cases involved known platforms and operational failures. For instance, Solana-based platform Step Finance lost $27.3 million after attackers compromised an executive device and stole private keys. Then the hacker drained treasury wallets after unstaking 261,854 SOL from the multisig. Step Finance announced the shutdown of operations after failing to secure funding or a buyer in February.

Defi platform Resolv suffered a breach that pulled roughly $25 million from the platform. Moreover, the attack broke the peg of its native stablecoin, USR. According to incident details, the exploiter issued 50 million unbacked USR during the breach. As a result, the incident damaged both reserves and market confidence at once.

Meanwhile, Ethereum-based verification and computation protocol Truebit absorbed one of the quarter’s largest blows. Investigators said attackers exploited an outdated smart contract and drained about 8,535 ether, worth roughly $26.6 million. The TRU token collapsed from $0.16 to near zero within hours as panic selling spread.

🚨ALERT🚨Hey @Truebitprotocol Our system has detected suspicious transaction with estimated loss of 26M!
An address got around 8,535 $ETH from "Truebit Protocol: Purchase"
More information will follow!
If you wish to safeguard yourself against such incident, please contact us to… pic.twitter.com/2AKvu1INyr

— 🚨 Cyvers Alerts 🚨 (@CyversAlerts) January 8, 2026

Phishing and Exploits Still Lead the Damage

Decentralized exchange aggregator SwapNet lost about $13.4 million after a flaw enabled arbitrary calls through approved token allowances. The hacker drained wallet balances from previously approved tokens. Researchers described it as one of the largest approval-based attacks outside phishing.

Furthermore, YieldBlox then lost about $10.5 million in an oracle manipulation attack on Stellar. A trader distorted the price of an illiquid pair, which inflated collateral values. This helped the attacker to borrow against that false price and emptied the pool. Later, validators froze roughly $7.2 million, which gave the protocol some room to compensate users.

Phishing remains the clearest trend behind 2026 crypto losses. A Crypto2Community report shows that phishing scams alone topped $300 million in January. During that month, the market recorded 16 hack incidents worth $86.01 million. That figure sat slightly below January 2025, yet it still topped December 2025 by more than 13%.