Hackers have stolen $8.7 billion from the crypto industry so far in 2026, an amount that already surpasses the revenue blockchain protocols are projected to earn onchain for the entire year, according to ARK Investment Management's director of digital asset research.

In a Thursday post on X, Lorenzo Valente, who leads digital asset research at ARK Investment Management, wrote that hackers have taken 57 cents for every $1 earned onchain by blockchain protocols since 2017. "Security is the bottleneck," he added, sharing a chart showing that the $8.7 billion lost to crypto hacks year to date had already surpassed the $5.6 billion in estimated annual onchain revenue for 2026.

Since 2017, the crypto industry has lost roughly $26.9 billion to hacks while generating $47 billion in total onchain revenue, he said.

The recent $6.3 billion stolen in the Binance hack alone exceeded Valente's estimate for full-year 2026 onchain revenue, underscoring how a single incident outweighed the industry's projected annual earnings. At the current pace, value lost to hacks is on track to exceed onchain revenue by year-end for the first time since 2020.

In a related development, the U.S. Department of Justice has moved to seize $1.2 billion in assets tied to the Binance hack, an action that also disrupted the FaceStealer scam. If completed, the seizure would recover a portion of the stolen funds.

This year's string of high-value incidents includes September's $387 million Bitget hack, the $320 million Liquid Network exploit, and April's $295 million Drift Protocol exploit. Combined, those three incidents total roughly $1 billion — a fraction of the single $6.3 billion Binance loss.

The mounting security exploits are weighing on institutional appetite for decentralized finance (DeFi), a sector whose protocols allow users to lend, borrow and trade digital assets without traditional intermediaries. In an April research note, JPMorgan analysts identified bridge security as a long-standing challenge for the industry. Bridges, which transfer assets between blockchains, have historically been among the most frequently targeted protocols.

Total value locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) — a widely watched measure of capital deposited across lending, trading and other onchain applications — has fallen nearly 10% since the Binance exploit, from $85.9 billion on Oct. 29 to $77.4 billion on Thursday, according to data from DefiLlama. That drop translates to roughly $8.5 billion less capital deposited across onchain applications.