Top hacks since Devcon SEA - what did we learn?
2026-11-04 –, Workshop 1

Discover the most daring blockchain hacks from late 2024 till today and how to defend against them. Join Mudit (CTO Polygon, formerly CISO Polygon), Nicholas (Safe Research) and Matthias (Founding Partner ChainSecurity) for an analysis of tactics and vulnerabilities, and gain valuable insights to stay ahead of the game.


Security remains a core challenge for adoption, reflected in its emphasis as a CROPS topic. Improving is only possible by learning from past mistakes: this session targets a broad audience to explain what happened over the last two years and what actionable lessons can strengthen Ethereum's security going forward.

We analyze the largest individual incidents down to the frequent small ones, which in aggregate carry significant volume. Much of this is first-hand, sometimes from the people most directly involved, drawing on close collaboration with SEALs like pcaversaccio, auditors, investigators and security leads of affected protocols.

Hacks covered range from the big ones - Bybit, Drift, Coldcard, KelpDAO, Cetus, Balancer - spanning code failures, DPRK operations and infrastructure attacks, to mid-size and small ones like GMX, SwissBorg, Venus and the constant background of social engineering, phishing and infostealer attacks.

Matthias Egli is a founding partner of ChainSecurity. He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich. Before ChainSecurity, Matthias had a prolific IT career both in the Silicon Valley as an expert data scientist, and in Switzerland as a software engineer and C-level executive. During his time at ChainSecurity, he has worked on many audits and contributed to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in the Ethereum protocol itself.

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Mudit is the Chief Technology Officer at Polygon. He's a security researcher by the day and an Ethereum developer by the night.

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Nick is a Research Engineer on the Safe Research team, where he works to advance self-custodial wallets and accounts on Ethereum. Before joining Safe, he helped design and build CoW Protocol and exploring intent-based trading and DeFi. At heart, he's a hacker and tinkerer with a soft spot for cryptography.