The Quantstamp Blog

$75.32M was lost across 32 crypto incidents in June, up from May's $59.52M. No coordinated campaign carried the month, but one targeted operation did. A targeted social-engineering attack against Humanity Protocol reached the keys behind the $H token and drained $32M, roughly 42% of every dollar lost in June. Quantstamp led the independent investigation and traced the tooling to a phishing campaign previously seen targeting macOS users. Offchain, a fresh npm supply chain wave hit Red Hat's packages on the first day of the month, and a PeopleSoft zero-day was exploited for two weeks before Oracle said a word. Here's the month in security 👇

$59.52M was lost across 29 crypto incidents, down sharply from April's ~$635M. No single hack carried the month. The bigger story happened off-chain, where a self-propagating npm worm called Mini Shai-Hulud kept resurfacing in new waves through the month, ultimately spanning more than 1,000 malicious package versions across the npm ecosystem.

April was undoubtedly a rocky month in security. $635M was lost across 28 crypto incidents. The Axios npm package was compromised on day one, exposing an estimated 600,000 installs in three hours. Vercel was breached through a third party. Three major CVEs under active exploitation. Here's the month in security 👇

Decentralized applications (dApps) (e.g., DEXes) increasingly span multiple Ethereum-compatible chains, such as a number of L2s. Although these chains are intended to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), subtle differences in opcode implementations can significantly alter smart contract behavior and security. This poses an important question: how can developers efficiently code and manage smart contracts targeting different chains?

The upcoming EVM hardfork, Pectra, amongst other changes, will implement EIP-7702, a proposal introducing a new transaction type that allows Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to delegate—and later undelegate—their behavior to smart contracts. While this upgrade enhances flexibility, it also disrupts long-standing security assumptions in many deployed contracts. With the risk that malicious actors may exploit these changes once Pectra is enabled, it is crucial to assess whether your codebase might be negatively impacted.

In recent months, AI agents have attracted significant attention by the promise of assisting users and automating complex processes across diverse applications. The rapid performance improvements of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP) tasks drive this trend. However, as the capabilities and reach of these agents expand, so do the risks. The rapid pace of development, combined with the intricacies of integrating LLMs into real-world infrastructures—especially in dynamic fields like blockchain—has created an urgent need to scrutinize them for security, compliance, and operational integrity.

March was a volatile month for the web3 security landscape, with significant security breaches totalling over $152 million in losses. Read on as we dive into four major security incidents and the trends from last month 👇

Quantstamp recently conducted a smart contract audit for Alchemy’s Modular Account, a wallet implementation designed from the ground up for ERC-4337 and ERC-6900 compatibility including two plugins

As the year comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on this year’s biggest hacks, root causes, and noteworthy trends.