Predicted 'Apocalypse of DeFi Hacks' Did Not Occur; Is This Sector Safer in the Age of AI?

With the rise of artificial intelligence tools over the past two years, many in the cryptocurrency industry warned that the DeFi ecosystem was on the brink of a hack-pocalypse or a wave of devastating hacking attacks; a scenario in which AI agents could quickly identify vulnerabilities in smart contracts and exploit them. However, new data indicates that this prediction has not yet materialized.

According to Mihan Blockchain, Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital, believes that while the number of recorded attacks reached a new high in 2026, the scale and financial damage of these attacks have significantly decreased; a trend that suggests larger DeFi protocols have become more resilient against AI-based threats.

Qureshi notes that this year's statistics show the average value of recorded hacks has now fallen to less than $500,000, while this figure was over $2 million in 2025.

He believes this change indicates that hackers using AI tools have increasingly targeted smaller, underused, or abandoned projects, while larger protocols have managed to secure themselves against this new threat to a large extent.

He also explained that if exceptional and very large events are removed from the statistics, the amount of stolen capital in 2026 is even less than last year. Among these significant events are the $1.4 billion hack of Bybit exchange in February 2025 and the attacks on Drift Protocol and KelpDAO this year.

Qureshi's remarks were made in response to concerns raised by Manuel Aráoz, founder of blockchain security company OpenZeppelin.

Aráoz recently stated that he considers almost the entire DeFi ecosystem to be insecure. From his perspective, the rapid advancement of AI-based programming agents has made it much easier to identify security weaknesses in smart contracts, which could increase the risk of attacks.

In fact, the main concern of critics is that AI can significantly reduce the time and cost of discovering vulnerabilities for attackers and provide complex hacking tools to a broader audience.

Despite the reduction in damage in part of the DeFi ecosystem, the overall picture of the market is not particularly reassuring.

Data from the DefiLlama platform shows that in April of this year, the total losses from cryptocurrency hacking attacks reached approximately $644 million, the highest level in over a year.

Such a figure was last observed in February 2025, when the historic hack of Bybit alone caused the total losses for that month to reach about $1.46 billion.

Importantly, this statistic does not only pertain to DeFi attacks but also includes incidents such as hacks of centralized exchanges, wallet thefts, phishing attacks, and other cybercrimes related to cryptocurrencies.

Blockchain security company CertiK also reached a similar conclusion in its report for the first half of 2026.

According to this report, the total losses from cryptocurrency hacks in the first six months of this year have decreased by 46.8% compared to the same period last year, amounting to approximately $1.32 billion.

However, CertiK warns that the decrease in the dollar value of thefts does not necessarily mean the industry is becoming safer. According to this company, last year's statistics were influenced by the $1.4 billion hack of Bybit; an event that remains the largest theft in the history of the cryptocurrency industry and complicates direct comparisons of the data.

One important point in CertiK's report is the prominent role of North Korean-affiliated hacker groups in recent attacks.

The company stated that over 70% of the recorded losses in the second quarter of 2026 were related to attacks on KelpDAO and Drift Protocol; attacks that are largely attributed to state-sponsored hackers from North Korea.

This again shows that the main threat to the crypto industry does not solely come from independent hackers or AI tools, but organized and state-sponsored groups still play a significant role in the largest thefts in this market.

Estimates from TRM Labs also indicate that North Korean hackers have stolen over $6 billion in cryptocurrency since 2017, making them one of the largest security threats to the blockchain ecosystem.

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