Opinion: AI has yet to trigger the end of DeFi hacking, and overall attack losses have declined this year

Comparing news, Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi said that there was no situation where the market previously feared that AI would trigger the end of DeFi hacking. According to the data, although the number of hacking incidents reached a new high in 2026, the median loss from a single attack has fallen below $500,000, compared to over $2 million in 2025.

Haseeb believes that AI-enabled attackers are currently mainly targeting small protocols with weak security protection, while larger DeFi protocols have gradually strengthened their defenses. Excluding the Bybit theft incident in 2025 and large-scale attacks such as KelpDAO and Drift Protocol in 2026, the average amount stolen this year is still lower than last year.

However, blockchain security company CertiK notes that the crypto industry's losses due to hacking fell 46.8% year-on-year to $1.32 billion in the first half of 2026, which does not mean that the industry's security has improved significantly. It said that last year's data was greatly affected by Bybit's $1.4 billion theft, and more than 70% of losses in the second quarter of this year still came from KelpDAO and Drift Protocol attacks, and related attacks are generally thought to be related to North Korean hacker groups.