April 2026 Was One of DeFi's Worst Months on Record

 


The numbers from April 2026 are hard to ignore. According to DefiLlama, more than $629.7 million was drained from DeFi protocols across the month. Two attacks account for roughly 92% of that. Drift Protocol on Solana lost $285 million on April 1 after North Korean state-sponsored hackers ran a six-month social engineering campaign against its team. KelpDAO lost $293 million on April 18 when a single-point bridge verification system was exploited to drain 116,500 rsETH across more than 20 chains.

Those two incidents are the story most outlets told. What they skipped is everything underneath.

Sui logged three separate exploits in roughly two weeks. Volo Vault lost $3.5 million. Scallop lost $150,000 to a bug that had been sitting in a deprecated contract for 17 months. Aftermath Finance was drained of $1.14 million and the attacker sent funds straight to KuCoin. Add in Pawtato in January, Typus in October 2025, and Nemo in September 2025, and Sui has now recorded six separate protocol exploits since September 2025.

Beyond Sui, Rhea Finance on NEAR lost $18.4 million but managed to recover nearly all of it through a coordinated response involving Tether freezes and ecosystem efforts. Grinex, a sanctioned Russia-linked exchange, lost $15 million and shut down entirely. SweatEconomy was hit for roughly $3 million in the final days of April.

Smaller hits kept stacking. Hyperbridge lost $2.5 million. Aethir lost $423,000. Dango lost $410,000. Silo V2 lost $392,000. BSC TMM/USDT lost $1.67 million. Judao lost $228,000. The list goes well past the two names in every headline.

CryptoNewsLive.org has been tracking every one of these incidents since they broke. The full April 2026 recap, including individual coverage of Aftermath Finance, Scallop, Volo, Purrlend, and the KelpDAO contagion through Aave, is live now.

Read the complete breakdown at https://www.cryptonewslive.org

If you are holding assets in any DeFi protocol right now, this is worth reading before your next move.

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