The cryptocurrency sector recorded 50 major hacks in August 2026, a 67% increase from the previous month, even as the value of stolen assets almost halved to $136.3m.
Data from blockchain security firm PeckShield shows the number of reported exploits rose from 30 in July. However, losses fell 49.5% from the approximately $270m stolen during July.
One attack accounted for more than half of August’s losses. The exploit against decentralised lending protocol Tectonicfi was responsible for about $74m, or more than 54% of the month’s total.
The attacker was unable to move most of those assets. Only about $6m was bridged out before the Cronos network paused its chain, leaving roughly $68m connected to the incident trapped.
The remaining $62.3m in losses came from a series of smaller attacks. Those included incidents involving Termlabs, which lost $8.5m, Moonwell with losses of $8.7m, Coinsbuy at $7.9m and TAC at $7.5m.
PeckShield’s figures suggest attackers are increasingly focusing on mid-sized protocols and individual decentralised finance, or DeFi, components rather than relying mainly on very large, headline-making exploits.
Security specialists and industry figures say many of those breaches share a common weakness: a single privileged key stored on an exposed or vulnerable device. If that key is stolen or compromised, an attacker can potentially take control of powerful smart contract functions.
AEREDIUM is seeking to address that risk with AERSeal, a product built on the company’s threshold key infrastructure. The system is designed to replace the private key traditionally used to control privileged smart contract operations with a threshold-signing arrangement requiring approval from multiple authorised parties.
Smart contracts can hold administrative powers that allow users to mint assets, upgrade the contract or carry out other privileged actions. Under a single-key system, losing the key can result in permanent loss of access, while its theft can give an attacker extensive control.
AERSeal instead distributes key shares between separate hardware-attested enclaves. The shares are not brought together to recreate a complete private key. Signatures are generated using the CGGMP24 threshold-signing protocol.
The smart contract itself does not need to be moved, and the product currently supports Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains and networks compatible with EVM.
Before custody is enabled, AERSeal identifies the permissions attached to a contract and requires those powers to be transferred to the threshold key. It then checks on-chain that the transfer has been completed. Customers can also verify the threshold key assigned to them independently.
That verification can be carried out using address derivation and a signed fresh challenge, including offline. The process is intended to demonstrate both that the key was derived correctly and that it is actually held, rather than requiring customers to rely only on AEREDIUM’s own confirmation.
Onboarding includes know-your-customer checks, contract registration, cryptographic key verification, the transfer of privileged powers, on-chain confirmation and activation of the customer’s approval policy.
“AERSeal is the first complete product to put AERKey into operation from end to end,” said Albert Dadon, founder and CEO of AEREDIUM. “The goal is to remove the idea that control over an entire smart contract should depend on one private key. With threshold signing and defined approval policies, control can be distributed and independently verified rather than concentrated in a single point.”
Dadon also told Bitcoin.com News that the architecture was designed to tackle the underlying weakness identified in reports such as PeckShield’s: privileged keys stored in full on machines that can be targeted by phishing attacks.
Under AERSeal’s hardware-attested enclave model, governance depends on agreement between authorised participants and hardware verification, rather than on a single developer workstation.
A compromised laptop would provide no more than one signatory seat. API tokens can suggest or propose actions but cannot approve them. Enclaves are admitted to the signing group only after fresh attestations have been checked against a distributed trust list, a process intended to guard against unauthorised hardware configurations and replay attacks.
With attackers continuing to test infrastructure across both established and emerging blockchain ecosystems, security leaders argue that replacing single-key control with threshold-based governance enforced inside hardware enclaves will be important in reducing smart contract exploits.
