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Morning Edition · Thursday, August 20, 2026Published at 1:47 AM EDT · New York
Bridge Signatures and Hot Wallets Drive Nearly $40 Million of Recent Crypto Thefts
The AFX Trade attacker did not break a contract, but produced five valid validator signatures, while the payment processor Coinsbuy lost $8.07 million across two chains and the funds were routed into monero.
Three incidents documented by Rekt, a site that tracks crypto security incidents, show where losses are actually occurring, and most did not involve audited contract logic. AFX Trade lost $24.15 million of USD Coin (USDC) on Arbitrum on Jul…
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Part of a tracked trend
Losses Move to Components That Worked as Designed
A growing share of DeFi losses will come not from buggy contract code but from components behaving exactly as specified — oracle forwarders, validator signature sets, governance votes and other trusted off-contract inputs — so audits and bug bounties scoped to on-chain code keep missing the failure surface, and protocols will be repeatedly forced to extend review, scope and monitoring to their privileged operational infrastructure.
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- Treasury Doubles Long-Bond Buybacks, and Crypto Prices Follow the Yield Curve Down
- Aztec Says a Flaw in Its Alpha V5 Proving System Can Make an Invalid Transaction Verify
- BitBox Patches Two Severe Wallet Firmware Bugs Found by Its Own AI-Assisted Audit
- Trump Presses the Senate on the CLARITY Act as a Lead Democrat Warns Against Rushing It
- CFTC Opens a Rulemaking Path for Compute Derivatives and Signals a Route Onshore for Hyperliquid
- Solana Cuts Block Times to 350 Milliseconds and Trims the Compute Budget to Match
- Researchers Propose a Cross-Chain Design That Never Locks Assets in a Bridge Contract
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