AEREDIUM Targets Single-Key Risk as Crypto Hacks Jump 67%

Crypto Exploits Surge in August as Financial Losses Drop

The cryptocurrency sector saw a sharp rise in security breaches in August 2026, recording 50 major hacks across the industry. According to new data from blockchain security firm Peckshield, the number of exploits increased by 67% from the 30 incidents logged in July.

Despite the surge in attack frequency, the total value of stolen assets fell sharply. Monthly losses reached $136.3 million, a 49.5% drop from the roughly $270 million stolen in July. A single exploit targeting decentralized lending protocol Tectonicfi accounted for about $74 million, more than 54% of the month’s total losses.

Although the Tectonicfi attack was large in scale, the exploiter struggled to offload the assets. Only about $6 million was bridged out before the Cronos network paused its chain, leaving most funds trapped. The remaining $62.3 million in losses came from dozens of smaller attacks on protocols including Termlabs ($8.5 million), Moonwell ($8.7 million), Coinsbuy ($7.9 million), and TAC ($7.5 million).

Peckshield’s analysis points to a shift in attacker strategy. While headline-grabbing mega-exploits declined compared with July, threat actors increasingly targeted mid-tier protocols and decentralized finance components. Industry experts note that despite varied attack vectors, many decentralized finance (DeFi) breaches still trace back to a single point of failure: compromised privileged keys stored on vulnerable endpoints.

New Product Launched to Tackle Single-Key Vulnerabilities

That single-key vulnerability is the same architectural flaw AEREDIUM aims to eliminate with its newly announced product built on its threshold key infrastructure. Known as AERSeal, the product is designed to remove the private key that typically controls privileged smart contract functions and replace it with threshold signing governed by multiple authorized approvers.

Smart contracts often carry powerful administrative permissions, including minting, upgrading, or executing other privileged actions. However, when those permissions depend on a single private key, losing that key can mean permanently losing access, while theft or compromise can give an attacker full control. AERSeal addresses this by transferring those privileged powers to a threshold key, with key shares held separately inside hardware-attested enclaves.

The shares are never reconstructed into a complete private key; instead, signatures are produced through the CGGMP24 threshold signing protocol. The smart contract itself does not move, and AERSeal currently supports Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and EVM-compatible chains.

Before custody is activated, the product identifies the privileged powers associated with the contract and requires them to be transferred to the threshold key. The system then verifies on-chain that those powers have been fully transferred. It also allows customers to independently verify the threshold key assigned to them.

Shift Toward Hardware-Attested Enclave Governance

Using address derivation and a signed fresh challenge, customers can verify both derivation and possession of the key—including offline—rather than relying solely on AEREDIUM’s assertion. Onboarding includes know-your-customer (KYC) verification, contract registration, cryptographic key verification, transfer of privileged powers, on-chain verification, 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.”

Meanwhile, Dadon told Bitcoin.com News that this architecture directly addresses the root cause of many exploits highlighted in reports like Peckshield’s: privileged keys that exist whole on machines that can be phished. Under AERSeal’s hardware-attested enclave model, governance relies on human consensus and hardware verification rather than a vulnerable developer workstation.

A compromised laptop yields at most one signatory seat while API tokens can propose actions but never approve them. Enclaves join the signing group only after fresh attestations verified against a distributed trust list, protecting against unauthorized hardware configurations and replay attacks.

As attackers continue testing infrastructure across emerging and established ecosystems, security leaders argue that moving away from single-key management toward threshold-based, enclave-enforced governance will be essential to reducing smart contract exploits.