Reporting date: November 12, 2026. Lorenzo Valente, director of digital asset research at ARK Investment Management, said blockchain protocols had lost about $26.9 billion to hacks since 2017, compared with $47 billion in total onchain revenue. That works out to roughly 57 cents lost for every dollar earned onchain, based on his figures.
In a post published that Thursday, Valente said hack losses had reached $8.7 billion year to date, already exceeding his $5.6 billion estimate for full-year 2026 onchain revenue. He said the reported $6.3 billion Binance hack alone exceeded that annual revenue estimate. At the time of reporting, hack losses were on track to exceed onchain revenue for the year for the first time since 2020; that was a projection, not a final annual result.
The article also reported a $387 million Bitget hack and a $320 million Liquid Network exploit in September, and a $295 million Drift Protocol exploit in April. In an April research note, JPMorgan analysts identified bridge security as a long-standing industry challenge.
Separately, DefiLlama data cited in the article put decentralized finance total value locked at $85.9 billion on October 29 and $77.4 billion on November 12, a decline of nearly 10%. That comparison describes the change in the metric; it does not establish how much of it was caused by the Binance exploit.
