BlockThreat - Week 16, 2026
KelpDAO suffers the biggest hack of the year, Hyperbridge gets caught by its own joke. 17 incidents, $329M in losses, and many harsh lessons for bridges, node operators, and DeFi teams still relying on broken trust models.
Never a dull day in crypto. Just two weeks after AppleJeus hit Drift Protocol, another elite North Korean crew, TraderTraitor, pulled off an even bigger and more sophisticated operation against KelpDAO through LayerZero. Hyperbridge made an April 1 joke about getting hacked only to get hacked for real two weeks later. All told, the week ended with 17 incidents and $329,124,550 in losses. In this edition, we break down the KelpDAO and LayerZero disaster, multiple CeFi exchange incidents and threat actors behind them, and the other major compromises that made this one of the most painful weeks of the year.
Paid subscribers can read on for the full breakdown of the KelpDAO and LayerZero hack, incident response lessons, infrastructure failures, and the complete roundup of this week’s hacks, phishing and malware campaigns, research, tools, and other essential threat intelligence.