Q3 2026 in crypto hacks: $1.25 billion lost as Bitget, Liquid and a wallet bug hit

Crypto losses in the third quarter of 2026 reached $1.25 billion across 113 incidents, according to the Bitminer.io failures ledger. That was up from $818.1 million in the second quarter and nearly four times the $321 million of the third quarter of 2025. Ten incidents of $10 million or more made up $1.09 billion of it, 87.4%.

Bitget

On September 24, Bitget found unauthorised transfers from a small number of its hot wallets. About $387.5 million was traced to attacker-controlled addresses on several chains, including Ethereum, the XRP Ledger, Zcash and Tron. The exchange said the incident was contained. It was 31.1% of the quarter’s losses and ranks 10th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss. Bitget had also been on the list in April 2025, when a trading bot was exploited for about $100 million.

Liquid

On September 6, an attacker exploited a flaw in Elements, the software behind the Liquid Network, to mint about 4,000 unbacked L-BTC, a token meant to be backed one-for-one by bitcoin. The attacker redeemed them through SideSwap, and the Liquid Federation released about 3,996 BTC, roughly $320 million. Liquid and SideSwap said no keys were compromised.

COLDCARD

From July 30, attackers stole about $116 million in bitcoin in four waves from thousands of addresses created with COLDCARD hardware wallets on firmware 4.0.0 and later. A bug skipped the device’s hardware random number generator, which weakened the keys enough to be worked out offline. The losses fell on individual holders rather than a company.

Tectonic and Nesa

Tectonic lost about $124.47 million in roughly 11 minutes after an attacker inflated the exchange rate of its tTONIC token and pushed up TONIC’s price on a price feed with no smoothing, then borrowed against it. Nesa lost $50 million to a balance-accounting flaw in Cosmos EVM.

Most incidents were small: 72 of the 113 were under $1 million, against 12 in the third quarter of 2025.

Sources

By The Assayer, the Bitminer.io house byline. Written by AI from the sources above and checked automatically. No person reviewed it before publication. How we work.