A review of DeFi protocol losses from 2020 to 2025 shows industry-wide hacks peaked at $2.62 billion in 2022 before falling roughly 80% to $534 million by 2024, as bridge exploits and smart contract vulnerabilities that once generated billion-dollar losses have become harder to execute. However, the
Hyperion DeFi is dissolving approximately $29 million worth of HYPE token agreements with DeFi protocols Felix and Native Markets following the decision to sunset its USDH stablecoin. The unwinding will return around 800,000 HYPE tokens to the company's treasury, which management says will be redeployed into strategies
Hyperliquid has captured a record share of the global perpetuals market, driven in part by HIP-3, its tokenized asset framework, which surpassed $62 billion in monthly trading volume. The milestone reflects growing institutional and retail appetite for decentralized derivatives infrastructure, with HIP-3 attracting significant speculative activity. However, the
Solayer has launched Margin Trade on mainnet, a perpetuals trading platform built natively on Solana that allows users to trade crypto assets, commodities, and equities from a single unified margin account. The platform leverages the SVM-compatible Solayer chain, aiming to bring traditional financial instruments and digital assets together in
Security vulnerabilities remain the primary barrier preventing major financial institutions from adopting decentralized finance, according to banking executives. While large lenders see genuine potential in blockchain technology — particularly for back-office functions such as settlement, clearing, and record-keeping — repeated high-profile exploits and protocol breaches are eroding institutional confidence.
Solstice Labs CEO Ben Nadareski argues that DeFi's path to institutional adoption requires developers to adopt the mindset and discipline of financial managers rather than move-fast-and-break-things technologists. Speaking amid a backdrop of persistent security exploits across decentralized protocols, Nadareski contends that ongoing vulnerabilities are
Radiant Capital, a cross-chain lending protocol, is winding down operations after proving unable to recover financially from a $50 million exploit suffered in 2024. The project disclosed that it has failed to recoup a meaningful portion of the stolen funds and has been unsuccessful in attracting new capital investment
Gnosis co-founder Martin Koppelmann has publicly committed to covering all user losses stemming from an exploit linked to Gnosis Pay, the project's Visa-backed crypto payment card service. The announcement came as the team continued efforts to contain the breach and assess its full scope. By guaranteeing
A LayerZero bridge verification failure triggered a $230 million exploit involving rsETH, prompting Aave to undertake a comprehensive overhaul of its asset-listing standards. The official postmortem identified the root cause as a flaw in cross-chain message verification rather than a traditional smart contract bug, signalling a broader shift
A newly drafted amendment to the XRP Ledger formally codifies why flash loan attacks cannot occur on the network, pointing to the chain's atomic transaction architecture as the key barrier. Unlike Ethereum, where flash loans allow users to borrow, exploit, and repay funds within a single transaction block,
Cosmos-based cross-chain protocol Gravity Bridge suffered a $5.4 million exploit after attackers allegedly gained control of a private key, giving them unauthorized access to the bridge's funds. The attacker drained USDC, ether, tether, and PAYG tokens before moving to obscure the stolen funds by routing
Near-daily exploits in decentralized finance are emerging as the primary obstacle preventing traditional financial institutions from adopting blockchain infrastructure, according to CertiK CEO and co-founder Ronghui Gu. April proved the worst month for DeFi security in four years, with protocols suffering attacks on 27 out of 30 days.