Crypto hacks stole $1.18 billion across the industry in the third quarter, with losses at exchange Bitget and Blockstream's Liquid Network accounting for the largest share of the damage, according to data compiled by CoinMarketCap.

The quarterly figure places Q3 among the worst periods for security incidents this cycle. Bitget and Liquid Network led the loss tables, a reminder that even seasoned infrastructure operators remain exposed to compromise at the custody and bridge layer.

What drove the $1.18B quarterly total?

The headline number aggregates exploits, private-key compromises and wallet drains reported across centralized and decentralized platforms during the quarter. Losses concentrated at two named victims rather than scattering across dozens of small DeFi incidents.

Bitget, a centralized exchange, sat at the top of the loss rankings. Liquid Network, the Bitcoin sidechain developed by Blockstream, followed. The pattern is consistent with the broader trend security researchers have flagged all year: the biggest single-event losses now come from custody failures and key management at large platforms, not from routine smart-contract bugs in long-tail protocols.

For exchanges, an exploit of this scale carries consequences beyond the stolen funds themselves. Platforms typically absorb losses from their own treasuries or insurance reserves to make users whole, a cost that hits the balance sheet directly. Larger operators have done exactly that in past incidents, but each payout compresses the capital cushion available for licensing, market-making and expansion.

Why do bridge and custody layers keep failing?

The Liquid Network result points at a recurring structural weakness. Sidechains and bridges hold large pooled pools of assets locked on one chain and represented on another, which makes them single points of failure. An attacker who gains control of signing keys or multisig quorums can move value in one transaction, regardless of how much audit work sits underneath the protocol.

Centralized custody carries a similar concentration problem. When exchange hot wallets or signing infrastructure fall to a compromised key or a supply-chain attack, the blast radius is measured in hundreds of millions, not thousands.

The operational read for institutional counterparties is straightforward: counterparty risk assessment now has to weight key-management architecture and reserve transparency as heavily as trading depth and regulatory status.

What happens next?

The Q3 total will pressure platforms to accelerate moves toward proof-of-reserves attestations, hardware-isolated signing and stricter multisig governance. Expect security firms and on-chain forensic teams to publish incident post-mortems on the Bitget and Liquid Network cases in the coming weeks, and regulators in major jurisdictions to cite the $1.18 billion quarterly figure as they finalize custody standards for the year ahead.