# This Year's Largest Crypto Losses Ran Through Keys and Signers Rather Than Broken Contract Code

Rekt's review of the first half puts the Coldcard seed failure at about $116 million, a validator-signature bridge drain at AFX Trade at $24.15 million and a second VerusCoin bridge loss at $7.54 million, all in components that behaved as specified.

- Published: 2026-08-15T05:40:49.580Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/crypto/2026-08-15/this-year-s-largest-crypto-losses-ran-through-keys-and-signe
- Publisher: Polylog (Crypto desk)
- Section: crypto
- Sources: [Rekt News](https://www.rekt.news/), [Bitcoin Magazine](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/bitcoiners-warned-of-wrench-attacks), [TRM Labs](https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/the-largest-hardware-wallet-exploit-of-2026-inside-the-usd-116-million-coldcard-hack), [Chainalysis](https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/violent-crypto-wrench-attacks-2026/)

The security publication Rekt makes a single argument across its recent incident reports: the largest losses of the first half of 2026 passed their audits, because the failures were not in the contract code. They were in keys, signature set…

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