Crypto hacks have cost $8.7 billion so far in 2026, more than the $5.6 billion in annual onchain revenue he estimates for the year, according to Lorenzo Valente, director of digital asset research at ARK Investment Management. Valente made the comparison in an X post on Thursday, Nov. 12, which Cointelegraph reported.
“Security is the bottleneck,” Valente wrote, according to Cointelegraph, sharing a chart that sets losses against protocol revenue.
A long-running imbalance
Valente also put the numbers in a longer perspective. Since 2017, the industry has lost about $26.9 billion to hacks and earned $47 billion in onchain revenue, he said. That works out to roughly 57 cents stolen for every $1 earned.
Cointelegraph adds that value lost to hacks is on track to exceed onchain revenue by year-end for the first time since 2020.
The Binance figure and other incidents
According to Cointelegraph, $6.3 billion was stolen in a recent Binance hack, an amount that alone exceeds Valente’s full-year revenue estimate. The report gives no details on the incident, and the dossier does not establish its date, mechanism, whether funds were recovered or what Binance has said officially. It is also not stated whether the $8.7 billion total includes the Binance figure, although that appears implied. The Binance amount should be treated as reported and unconfirmed.
Cointelegraph also lists other large incidents this year: a $387 million hack at Bitget in September, a $320 million exploit of Liquid Network, and a $295 million exploit of Drift Protocol in April.
Market impact
According to DefiLlama data cited by Cointelegraph, total value locked in decentralized finance fell nearly 10% after the Binance exploit, from $85.9 billion on Oct. 29 to $77.4 billion on Thursday.
Cointelegraph links the string of exploits to weaker institutional appetite for DeFi, and recalls that JPMorgan analysts described bridge security as a long-standing challenge in an April research note.
What remains unclear
The methodology behind Valente’s estimates of hack losses and onchain revenue is not explained in the available material, so the comparison between the two figures rests on his own definitions. The analysis comes from one analyst and one outlet, and the underlying chart was not independently reviewed here.
Sources
- cointelegraph.com Cointelegraph — Crypto hack losses equal 57 cents per $1 earned onchain: Ark’s Valente Accessed
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