Autor Cointelegraph by Zoltan Vardai

Cryptocurrency hacks soared to $1.18 billion across 107 recorded incidents in the third quarter of 2026, according to security company Hacken.Hacken’s Q3 report attributed 77% (about $906 million) to compromised suppliers or developer tools, publicly disclosed fixes that had not been deployed, or other components outside security reviews.The four largest incidents included the $387 million Bitget hack, the $320 million Liquid Network exploit, the $120 million Tectonic exploit, and the Coldcard firmware vulnerability, associated with an estimated $115 million in losses.This Q3 was the most damaging quarter for crypto hacks since Q1 2025, when Bybit’s $1.4 billion loss to North Korea pushed the total to $1.6 billion.Q3 losses in total amount and composition. Source: HackenAbout 80% of the quarter’s losses were concentrated in four of the largest incidents, while 98 of the incidents recorded losses below $10 million. The median loss across all 107 incidents was $670,000.While supplier compromises and infrastructure failures drove much of the stolen value, smart contract incidents were the most frequent, accounting for $228 million in losses across 71 incidents as the most exploited attack vector.Related: Anthropic warns ‘AI worms’ may autonomously spread across devices like a virusAbout a third of losses was returned or reversed after Q3 crypto hacksOf the $1.18 billion lost, about $387 million was returned or reversed, accounting for the recovery of about 33% of gross losses.Following the Liquid Network hack, self-proclaimed “white hats” returned $272 million, representing about 85% of the stolen value.In the Tectonic incident, Cronos validators rolled back 114 minutes of settled blockchain history, reversing about $111.2 million of the $120.4 million in affected borrowing. Also, stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether froze about $340,000 tied to the Bitget theft.Operators covered an additional $410 million of user losses from their own funds. Bitget’s user protection fund covered $387 million, while Triple-A, Coinsbuy and TAC repaid about $22 million, making users whole, while stolen assets remained with attackers.About $384 million, or 32% of gross losses, was neither returned nor covered.Amount of losses covered by operators, compared to amount returned or reversed. Source: HackenHacken urged industry participants to strengthen the cybersecurity of third-party suppliers, developer tools and other external infrastructure that may fall outside security audits.The company also recommended that protocols expand security audits to include oracles, bridgers, custody systems, signing authorities and other privileged components.Magazine: Inside the ‘fake police raid’ that forced a $1M Bitcoin transfer

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Saifedean Ammous, the author of the 2018 academic book “The Bitcoin Standard,” said that Bitcoin already functions as a medium of exchange and that volatility’s effect on that is likely to diminish.Bitcoin (BTC) can serve as a medium of exchange as it becomes less volatile than gold while surpassing the market capitalization of the largest precious metal, wrote Ammous in a Tuesday X post.“Holding Bitcoin is using Bitcoin as money, and its lack of widespread use as a method of payment is no evidence against its monetization unfolding,” added Ammous. The remarks come in response to a passage in Professor Lawrence H. White’s book, “Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?,” which argued that Bitcoin’s fixed supply makes it too volatile to serve as a medium of exchange. “With no supply response to demand swings, BTC’s price is too volatile for people who want a reliable medium of exchange,” wrote White in a Monday X post, referencing chapter six of his book. He added that the lack of supply response was the reason stablecoins have “eaten BTC’s lunch transaction volume.” Other industry watchers have also predicted that Bitcoin would eventually surpass gold. In May 2025, Bitwise’s head of European research, André Dragosch, told Cointelegraph that their in-house prediction forecasts a $1 million Bitcoin price by 2029, which would make Bitcoin match gold’s market capitalization.However, Bitcoin’s current $1.6 trillion market capitalization would need to grow by at least 18-fold to surpass Gold’s near $29 trillion market cap to become the leading global asset.In April 2025, Blockstream CEO Adam Back predicted Bitcoin will start rivaling gold’s use cases as a monetary hedge, due to global financial instability and rising fiat inflation. Related: Ledger implant tests Bitcoin ETFs as safer custodial solutions than hardware walletsCointelegraph 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.

Cointelegraph is committed to providing independent, high-quality journalism across the crypto, blockchain, AI, and fintech industries.All news, reviews, and analyses are produced with full journalistic independence and integrity. For more details on our standards and processes, please read our Editorial Policy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic warned that self-replicating autonomous AI systems may start spreading across user devices without human intervention, akin to computer viruses. Rogue “AI worms” may start autonomously targeting everyday devices, including Android TVs, smart appliances, cameras and other internet-connected devices with basic computing power and weak security, according to a Monday report by researchers William Zhou and Daniel Freeman for Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team.Small AI models may be “months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices,” which would be a challenging threat as it would have “no centralized point to shut off,” the authors said. The warning follows renewed concerns over the growing mathematical capabilities of AI models, which may eventually break the cryptographic signatures used in crypto wallets, threatening about one-third of the Bitcoin supply. Almost a third of global Bitcoin supply, or 6.26 million BTC, currently sits in addresses vulnerable to being broken by AI models or quantum computers. However, 4.33 million are exposed because of address reuse, meaning that moving that BTC to fresh wallets would end the exposure, wrote Glassnode co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft in a Thursday X post. A day earlier, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned that rapid AI advancements could break the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) securing cryptocurrency wallets sooner than previously expected and urged users to migrate to fresh wallets.Dragonfly’s managing partner, Haseeb Qureshi, called the warning “cryptographic doomerism” and said that migrating tokens to fresh addresses was not a real solution against the threat.Related: AI has not triggered DeFi ‘hackpocalypse,’ Dragonfly partner saysCointelegraph 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.