Blockstream CEO Adam Back, the British cryptographer and inventor of Hashcash, said it’s “flattering” that people think he’s Satoshi Nakamoto and was probably the result of his being a little too “talkative” on the cypherpunk mailing list that started it all.

Back was speaking in a fireside chat with Cointelegraph at the recent LONGITUDE event in Paris, co-hosted by crypto exchange OKX, with discussions centered on crypto regulation, market structure and the growth of stablecoins.

Adam Back denies renewed suggestions that he invented Bitcoin

“It is flattering in some sense that they think you could have done it,” Back told Cointelegraph, reflecting on the widely publicized New York Times article on April 8 that suggested he is Satoshi, a claim he has denied.

Back said there is a logical reason people think he’s Bitcoin’s creator. “The problem for me is I was very talkative on the mailing list,” he said, referring to the 1992 Cryptography Mailing List, where Satoshi later introduced the Bitcoin white paper in October 2008.

“So anytime anyone was talking about electronic cash, I was right there, I was the reply guy with something to say about it,” he said.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back speaking at LONGITUDE. Source: Cointelegraph

Back said the mystery behind Satoshi is an “interesting question” that he and others in the industry have pondered but never answered.

Prior to the fireside with Back, the event also featured three panels covering the role of traditional financial institutions in Web3, the need for clearer regulation and the pace of stablecoin adoption, alongside a separate fireside chat with OKX Europe CEO Erald Ghoos.

MiCA is “extremely beneficial,” but brings risks to innovation

Crypto industry executives said recent moves to regulate the industry have been positive for improved clarity, but regulatory fragmentation and overregulation could hurt innovation.

In an onstage interview, Ghoos shed light on the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, a framework with which OKX Europe was deemed fully compliant in January 2025.

“I think MiCA is extremely beneficial for the industry,” Ghoos said, explaining that it has helped to build trust in crypto.

OKX Europe CEO Erald Ghoos speaking to Cointelegraph journalist Ciaran Lyons at LONGITUDE. Source: Cointelegraph

“Now it is a fully regulated asset class, which is very important,” Ghoos said, adding that industry participants will be “vetted and held up to the highest standards.”

However, he warned that the “regulatory burden” could slow innovation across Europe.

“Right now, because there is such a big and heavy regulatory overhead for startups, I do fear even more that the innovation and the great entrepreneurship that we have in Europe will start to shift to other jurisdictions around the world,” he said.

CertiK CEO Ronghui Gu said the lack of a unified global framework is a pain point for the industry.

“For developers, for crypto companies in different regions, they are still under different compliance frameworks,” Gu said.

Commenting on the proposed US CLARITY Act, which has been delayed largely because of unresolved issues around stablecoin yields impact on the banking system, Gu said that while the bill aims to bring structure, “many terms are not that clear to be honest, and a little bit vague.”

“I think different firms have different interpretations and so on,” he added.

Ronghui Gu speaking at LONGITUDE. Source: Cointelegraph

“But I would say it definitely gives a much more friendly environment to crypto companies, to developers,” he added.

Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard said he is “very confident” the CLARITY Act will pass soon, adding: “You feel the vibration from the policymakers saying we are going to adopt this,” he said.

“They are super stoked about it,” Gregaard added.

Frederik Gregaard speaking at LONGITUDE. Source: Cointelegraph

“When this passes, from the non-TradFi adoption, you are going to see 100X,” Gregaard said, arguing that “classical industries” have been waiting for clarity before embracing the technology.

US Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said on Monday that he does not expect the Senate Banking Committee to mark up the legislation, also known as the CLARITY Act, in April and has recommended that Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott schedule it for next month.

Payments industry does a good job of “almost faking” real-time payments

Mastercard’s senior vice president for blockchain and digital assets, Christian Rau, said that stablecoins are “very well suited for payment purposes” during a panel with Stella Development Foundation chief business officer Raja Chakravorti and Ethereum Foundation enterprise lead Matthew Dawson.

“They don’t come with the volatility of other digital assets, given that they enjoy regulatory clarity in a lot of the world,” Rau said.

Rau said the traditional payments industry does a “good job of almost faking real-time payments.”

“When I tap my card, it says transaction approved or payment made…it’s authorization, clearing, and settlement,” he said.

“A lot of the things that work arguably very well today, they still come with time delays, costs, and so forth,” he added.

Related: How Mastercard plans to settle card payments with stablecoins

Meanwhile, Stella Foundation’s Chakravorti pointed to the roughly $317 billion in stablecoin circulation, which is up about 50% from last year, adding that he is starting to see some short-term cooling.

“Although to be clear, over the last two quarters, that’s started to slow down a little bit,” calling it a positive sign as it suggests parts of the underlying infrastructure are starting to mature.

“I think this next transition is local stablecoins, because people are now very focused on creating that opportunity in their economy as super important,” he said.

Chakravorti pointed to the “last mile” as one of the biggest hurdles for adoption, referring to the challenge of turning digital assets into something “workable” inside local financial systems.

“I think it is the absolute key, ultimately, that is where all the friction lies within this system,” he said.

Magazine: Adam Back says current demand is ‘almost’ enough to send Bitcoin to $1M

Arbitrum’s Security Council froze exploiter-held ETH after coordinating with law enforcement.

Arbitrum said its Security Council initiated an emergency intervention to secure funds linked to the recent KelpDAO exploit after identifying 30,766 ETH held on Arbitrum One in an address tied to the attacker.

User activity remained unaffected during the process.

Arbitrum Security Council Steps In

The council stated it had coordinated with law enforcement regarding the exploiter’s identity and that the action was carried out with a focus on preserving network integrity.

After conducting technical analysis and internal deliberations, Arbitrum’s council implemented a method to isolate and transfer the funds without affecting any other chain state or its users. The assets were moved to an intermediary wallet, effectively freezing them and removing access from the original address.

According to the official announcement, the transfer was completed on April 20 at 11:26 pm ET. Any further movement of the funds will require governance-level decisions in coordination with relevant stakeholders.

Just before the intervention, Onchain Labs reported that the exploiter appeared to have burned 30,766 ETH, worth $70.94 million on Arbitrum.

KelpDAO Hack

The incident traces back to the KelpDAO exploit on April 18, which led to the loss of about 116,500 rsETH tokens, worth around $292 million. It was one of the largest DeFi breaches this year. The attackers targeted KelpDAO’s cross-chain bridge built on LayerZero Labs infrastructure. According to LayerZero, the attacker gained access to components of its decentralized verified network by compromising RPC nodes and disrupting normal operations, which allowed a fraudulent cross-chain message to be approved and executed.

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LayerZero blamed the scale of the breach on KelpDAO’s use of a 1-of-1 verification setup, which lacked independent validation. KelpDAO, in response, stated,

“The 1-of-1 DVN setup is the configuration documented in LayerZero’s documentation and shipped as the default for any new OFT deployment. Kelp has operated on LayerZero infrastructure since January 2024 and has maintained an open communication channel with the LayerZero team throughout. The question of DVN configuration came up during Kelp’s L2 expansion, and defaults were affirmatively confirmed as appropriate at that time.”

The impact spread beyond the bridge as a large portion of the stolen assets moved into lending protocols. On Aave V3, for instance, the attacker deposited rsETH as collateral and borrowed large amounts of wrapped ETH. These positions were left with low health factors, which raised the possibility of bad debt within the protocol.

An attempt to bridge 19.6 WBTC away was intercepted and blocked by the protocol, thereby removing the assets from the attacker’s control.

Volo Protocol, a liquid staking platform built on the Sui network, reported a security breach that led to the loss of approximately $3.5 million from its vaults, according to an official update shared by the team.

The exploit impacted three vaults holding assets in WBTC, XAUm, and USDC.

Recovery Efforts Intensify

In an official update, the protocol said it detected the attack and responded immediately by notifying the Sui Foundation and other ecosystem partners, while also freezing the affected vaults to prevent further losses. As part of its control measures, all vaults have been temporarily frozen pending a full investigation and remediation process.

Volo stated that the vulnerability was isolated to the three compromised vaults and confirmed that the remaining vaults, which account for around $28 million in total value locked, are not affected and remain secure with no shared attack vector. The team also said it is working with on-chain investigators and partners to recover the stolen funds and will release a detailed post-mortem once the investigation is complete.

In subsequent updates, Volo reported freezing roughly $500,000 worth of assets linked to the exploit. In a separate development, the protocol said it had successfully blocked an attacker’s attempt to bridge 19.6 WBTC out of the hacker’s control.

Volo added that it is coordinating with ecosystem participants to determine the appropriate process to return the intercepted assets. The protocol stated it is prepared to absorb the financial loss and aims to avoid passing the impact on to users.

“We are in damage control mode now, but once that’s done, we will work out a remediation plan, and a full breakdown will be shared shortly.”

April DeFi Exploit Wave

A series of major exploits hit DeFi platforms in April. For instance, attackers drained about $285 million from the Solana-based Drift Protocol in roughly 12 minutes, and most of the funds were bridged to Ethereum shortly after. On-chain activity linked to the attack had begun as early as March 11.

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In a separate incident, NEAR protocol’s Rhea Finance lost an estimated $7.6 million after an oracle manipulation exploit. Meanwhile, KelpDAO suffered the largest DeFi hack of the year, with attackers stealing around $292 million from its cross-chain bridge built on LayerZero Labs infrastructure.

Private key compromises are emerging as one of crypto’s costliest attack vectors, with hackers stealing more than $17 billion across 518 recorded incidents over the past decade, according to data platform DefiLlama.

In data shared Tuesday, DefiLlama’s dashboard shows a large share of those incidents stemmed from compromised private keys, alongside phishing and other credential-based attacks.

Around 22.3% of the incidents were attributed to private key compromises through “brute force,” 18.2% to private key compromises via “unknown methods,” and 10% occurred due to phishing attacks on multi-signature wallets.

The figures add to evidence that some of the industry’s biggest losses are increasingly coming from weaknesses in wallet security, signing infrastructure and user behavior, rather than from flaws in protocol code alone.

The findings come days after the crypto industry suffered its largest hack so far in 2026 on Saturday, when an attacker drained about 116,500 restaked Ether (rsETH), worth roughly $290 million to $293 million at the time, from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered rsETH bridge.

DeFi protocols lost $600 million in two months: GSR Research

The recent wave of losses has also hit decentralized finance hard. More than $600 million was stolen from DeFi protocols over the past 60 days, according to a Monday report from crypto trading company GSR, with the Kelp exploit and the April 1 exploit involving Solana-based decentralized exchange Drift Protocol accounting for most of the total.

The attacks are raising new questions about whether improving smart contract audits alone is enough to protect users. In its report, GSR said attackers appear to be shifting toward “operational security, signing infrastructure, developer tooling, and the humans behind them” as smart contract security continues to improve.

That shift is pressuring a sector already facing narrower returns. “DeFi yields have compressed toward TradFi rates, raising the question of whether depositing onchain is still worth the risk,” GSR wrote.

“Lazy” hacks are spreading due to AI and malware

Cybersecurity companies say advances in malware and artificial intelligence are making social engineering and wallet-targeting attacks easier to scale, which involve scammers tricking victims into sending crypto to illicit addresses by first sending them small transactions, hoping that investors copy and paste the attacker’s address from the transaction history.

Related: ZachXBT asks MemeCore to explain valuation and token supply

The rise of hacking-as-a-service tools is also lowering the barrier to entry for would-be attackers, according to Dyma Budorin, co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Hacken.

“If people are getting these links, their wallets can be completely drained,” Budorin told Cointelegraph in an interview at EthCC 2026. “The platform on the darknet will take the commission for their tools and [scammers] get the bigger portion of the drained wallets.”

Budorin added that hackers are usually seeking out the easiest targets that require the least effort to scam.

Web3 projects lost $482 million in the first quarter of 2026, as phishing and social engineering scams drove $306 million of those losses as the largest attack vector, according to a report by Hacken.

Even so, some parts of the threat picture have improved. Scam Sniffer said in a January report that losses tied to crypto phishing attacks fell sharply in 2025, suggesting users were becoming more aware of the threat, even as wallet-drainer scripts and new malware strains continued to circulate.

Magazine: 53 DeFi projects infiltrated, 50M NEO tokens could be ‘given back’: Asia Express

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently. Read our Editorial Policy https://cointelegraph.com/editorial-policy

Ethereum’s Total Value Locked dropped nearly 11% in 24 hours while Bitcoin, Tron and BSC were not as badly affected.

The fallout from the $293 million KelpDAO exploit over the weekend has spread across the DeFi ecosystem, with Total Value Locked (TVL) across several chains dropping significantly in the last 24 hours.

According to data from on-chain analytics platform DeFiLlama, at least 126 of the networks it tracks were in the red, with CosmoHub the hardest hit, having lost more than 1,500% of its TVL in that period.

A Broad-Based Retreat Across Major Chains

Pseudonymous analyst Vet brought attention to the decline, writing in a post on X that TVL was going down on all the top 20 DeFi chains. “Money is exiting,” they noted, adding that people were “repricing the risk/reward.”

Indeed, when CryptoPotato checked the data, we found that the pullback was widespread, although the scale varied. For example, Ethereum, the largest DeFi chain with more than 1,700 protocols, posted a 24-hour TVL dip of nearly 11%. Its nearest rival, Solana, fared relatively better, going down by just over 4% in the last day, although the change was more noticeable across one month, at 19.06%.

Arbitrum, Base, and Avalanche also saw their TVL dip by 9.97%, 5.76%, and 6.61%, respectively, while Bitcoin, Tron, and BSC were the least affected among the top ten chains by TVL, with none of them taking a hit bigger than 1.6%. Meanwhile, in that group, Hyperliquid was the worst hit, shedding more than 12% of the total value of assets it held and taking its dollar worth to $1.44 billion.

Outside the top 10, the losses were sharper, with Mantle, which DeFiLlama co-founder 0xngmi flagged as one of those most exposed to bad debt after the hack, alongside Base and Arbitrum, down almost 42%. Others that were heavily hit included Taiko, which lost 22% of its TVL; Monad, which went down 13.21% in 24 hours; and Berachain, which dipped by over 17%.

Other Chains Made Gains

The flight from risk did not reach every corner, though, with some smaller chains posting gains. One of them, Q Protocol, jumped 477% in 24 hours, with Oasys and Shibarium also in the green, gaining 90.6% and 85%, respectively.

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The KelpDAO hack is the worst security breach in the DeFi space so far this year. Reports say that the liquid restaking protocol lost over $293 million after an attacker took advantage of its bridge contract. LayerZero has since said that the Lazarus Group’s TraderTraitor unit was behind the attack.

Total value locked on decentralized lending protocol Aave dropped by nearly $8 billion over the weekend after hackers behind the $293 million Kelp DAO exploit borrowed funds on Aave, leaving roughly $195 million in “bad debt” on the protocol and triggering withdrawals.

Data from DeFiLlama shows that Aave’s TVL fell from about $26.4 billion to $18.6 billion by Sunday, losing the top spot as the largest DeFi protocol. 

Aave v3’s lending pools for USDt (USDT) and USDC (USDC) are now at 100% utilization, meaning that more than $5.1 billion worth of stablecoins cannot be withdrawn until new liquidity arrives or borrows are repaid. 

Aave’s TVL fall shows how rapidly risk from a single security incident can spread throughout the broader, interconnected DeFi lending market, potentially leading to a severe liquidity crisis.

The incident began on Saturday when hackers stole 116,500 Kelp DAO Restaked ETH (rsETH) tokens worth about $293 million from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge and used them as collateral on Aave v3 to borrow wrapped Ether (wETH).

Crypto analytics platform Lookonchain said the move created about $195 million in “bad debt” on Aave, which contributed to the Aave (AAVE) token tanking nearly 20% from $112 on Saturday at 6:00 pm UTC to $89.5 about 25 hours later. 

Lookonchain noted that some of the largest crypto whales to withdraw funds from Aave were the MEXC crypto exchange and Abraxas Capital at $431 million and $392 million, respectively.

Several crypto networks and protocols tied to rsETH or the LayerZero bridge have paused use of the bridge until the problem is resolved, including DeFi platform Curve Finance, stablecoin issuer Ethena and BitGo’s Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC).

Aave has frozen several rsETH, wETH markets

Shortly after the Kelp DAO exploit, Aave said it froze the rsETH markets on both Aave v3 and v4 to prevent any suspicious borrowing and later stated that rsETH on Ethereum mainnet remains fully backed by underlying assets.

WETH reserves also remain frozen on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Mantle and Linea, Aave said.

This incident marks the first significant stress test of Aave’s “Umbrella” security model, which was introduced in June 2025 to provide automated protection against protocol bad debt while enabling users to earn rewards.

Related: Aave DAO backs V4 mainnet plan in near-unanimous vote

Earlier this month, the Bank of Canada found that Aave avoided bad debt in its v3 market by using overcollateralization, automated liquidations and other strategies that shifted risk to borrowers.

In comments to Cointelegraph, Aave defended its liquidation-based model, framing it as a core safety mechanism that protects lenders while limiting downside for borrowers.

It comes as Aave parted ways with its longest-standing DeFi risk service provider, Chaos Labs, on April 6, following disagreements over the direction of Aave v4 and budget constraints.

Magazine: Are DeFi devs liable for the illegal activity of others on their platforms?

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently. Read our Editorial Policy https://cointelegraph.com/editorial-policy

Stablecoins behave like a fragmented foreign exchange market, where liquidity is spread across blockchains and pools, creating price differences and uneven access to dollar liquidity.

Moving stablecoins looks simple on the surface. But under the hood, it’s often a multi-step transaction routed across chains and pools.

“It’s a very special case of a foreign exchange market onchain, and that leads to bad user experience, with unexpected slippage, transaction reversion and unfamiliar information when moving your dollar from point A to point B,” Ryne Saxe, CEO at stablecoin infrastructure company Eco, told Cointelegraph.

Stablecoins now have a market capitalization above $320 billion, led by Tether’s USDt (USDT) and Circle’s USDC (USDC). 

But as institutions and large traders enter the market, moving large sums of stablecoins becomes harder to execute cleanly.

Stablecoins aren’t as fungible as they seem

A stablecoin may be pegged to the dollar — or other fiat currencies — but it does not trade as a unified asset, with liquidity split across issuers, blockchains and decentralized finance (DeFi) venues, each with its own depth, pricing and access conditions.

“Stablecoins, between them, aren’t very fungible,” said Saxe. “The different profiles between those markets mean pricing and moving stablecoins seamlessly and efficiently across them is actually a hard problem that people take for granted.”

In practice, a dollar stablecoin on one chain may not be equivalent to the same asset elsewhere. Differences in collateral backing, market access and liquidity depth create pricing gaps that widen with size or in thinner markets.

Those differences are typically negligible in liquid markets and for smaller transactions. But as trades get larger, the gaps become bigger.

“The more major DeFi markets focus on stablecoins, the more chains focus on stablecoins, the more stablecoin assets there are, the more fragmented,” Saxe said. “People think these are just dollars, but they’re actually not.”

In a March report, payments startup Borderless found that pricing divergence in stablecoins depends largely on where liquidity is sourced.

Related: Instant settlement strains crypto’s capital efficiency: Ethan Buchman

The report collected hourly buy and sell rates throughout February across 66 stablecoin-to-fiat corridors — or conversion routes such as USDC to Mexican pesos — covering 33 currencies and seven blockchains. The data showed that USDC and USDT traded almost identically in most cases.

Larger differences emerged at the provider level, where pricing gaps in the same corridor could exceed hundreds of basis points, making execution quality dependent on access to liquidity and routing across venues.

Stablecoins become harder to move at size

As stablecoins currently stand, their market structure resembles foreign exchange, where dollar proxies circulate across disconnected markets, according to Saxe. That becomes more visible in larger stablecoin movements across chains.

Stablecoins have become a centerpiece for institutions moving into digital assets, used for trading, cross-border payments and onchain treasury management. Firms rely on them to move capital between venues, settle trades and access yield opportunities across DeFi markets.

Related: Why yen stablecoins are key to Japan’s crypto ambitions

Unlike retail users, institutions often move tens of millions of dollars at a time, where execution needs to be fast, predictable and efficient.

“If liquidity is spread out, trying to sell $10 million of one stablecoin and buy $10 million of another in a single step will move the market,” Saxe said. “What usually needs to happen is breaking that transaction into multiple branches, which may route differently and converge at the destination.”

In such cases, fragmentation becomes a constraint. Instead of drawing from a single pool of dollar liquidity, institutions must navigate multiple chains, issuers and venues, each with different liquidity conditions. Moving size can shift prices, require splitting trades and introduce uncertainty into execution.

“Right now, they don’t have the risk management, trust and infrastructure that they need to move or hold a lot of stablecoins at size onchain by default,” Saxe said.

Stablecoins need infrastructure, not more supply

Companies are starting to build infrastructure to address those gaps, but they are doing so from different assumptions about what the problem actually is.

Circle is treating stablecoins as the foundation of a new FX system, where multiple currencies, liquidity providers and settlement layers are connected through shared infrastructure. Meanwhile, Eco focuses on routing and execution, aggregating liquidity across fragmented markets.

Both approaches point to the issue of stablecoins existing across multiple chains or issuers, but the liquidity behind them is distributed and uneven. Moving funds requires interacting with that fragmented liquidity, which introduces pricing differences, routing complexity and execution risk. 

“Fragmentation creates more spread between prices, meaning worse execution in many cases. To solve that, you need to read across markets, see the full liquidity picture, even if it’s fragmented, and route across it,” Saxe said.

For institutions, that complexity directly limits how much capital can move onchain. As Saxe explained, stablecoin flows need to become far more predictable before institutions have the risk management and trust required to move or hold large amounts onchain.

Magazine: Will the CLARITY Act be good — or bad — for DeFi?

Cointelegraph Features publishes long-form journalism, analysis, and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Research or perspective in this article does not reflect the views of Cointelegraph as a company unless explicitly stated. Content published in Features does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence. The selection, commissioning, and publication of Features and Magazine content are not influenced by advertisers, partners, or commercial relationships. This content is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy.

At least 12 DeFi protocols and crypto businesses have been attacked in just over two weeks since the $280 million Drift Protocol exploit on April 1.

Attacks aimed at crypto protocols or companies since the start of April include CoW Swap, Hyperbridge, Bybit, Dango, Silo Finance, BSC TMM, Aethir, MONA, Zerion and, most recently, Rhea Finance and the Grinex exchange. 

The Drift Protocol was hit with one of the largest exploits this year on April 1, losing around $280 million in a long-running social engineering attack suspected to involve North Korean-affiliated actors.

The attacks also come amid growing concerns this month that advancing AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and equivalent models, could eventually make it even easier for cyberattackers in the future.

Rhea Finance exploited for $7.6 million

DeFi protocol Rhea Finance reported on Thursday that an attacker “leveraged a vulnerability in Rhea’s Margin Trading feature to execute a coordinated pool manipulation attack,” impacting the Rhea Lend smart contract. 

Around $7.6 million was extracted, according to blockchain security firm CertiK. 

“The attacker created fake token contracts and added liquidity in fresh pools, likely misleading the oracle and validation layer,” it explained. 

Meanwhile, the Russia-linked Grinex exchange suspended operations after a $13.7 million hack on Thursday, blaming “unfriendly states” for the incursion. 

Related: Stablecoin issuer Circle faces lawsuit over $280M Drift Protocol hack

Another attack this month was aimed at the Binance Smart Chain TMM/USDT liquidity pool, which suffered a reserve manipulation attack, resulting in the loss of around $1.67 million in early April, R3ACH Network analyst Jussy said on Thursday. 

It followed just days after bridge aggregator Dango lost $410,000 from a smart contract bug on April 13.

In the same month, lending protocol Silo Finance lost $392,000 on April 3 from a misconfigured oracle exploit and decentralized GPU cloud computing platform Aethir lost $423,000 in an access control exploit on April 9. 

DPRK ups AI social engineering attacks

The Drift Protocol and Zerion wallet exploits were two examples of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea-affiliated groups using AI and social engineering to infiltrate crypto companies to steal credentials and funds. 

Malicious actors pilfered over $168.6 million in cryptocurrency from 34 DeFi protocols in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from DefiLlama.

Magazine: Forget stablecoin yield, how does the CLARITY Act treat DeFi?

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently. Read our Editorial Policy https://cointelegraph.com/editorial-policy