What happened
Crypto Briefing flagged a Pomp Podcast appearance on Monday in which Chris Perkins put April's crypto-hack losses at around $600 million, describing it as a record month for incidents in the space. Perkins, a long-time markets and infrastructure voice, used the conversation to argue that the industry's defensive posture isn't keeping pace with attacker tooling. He pointed to AI as the reason.
Generative models compress reconnaissance, phishing, and exploit-prototyping work that used to take weeks into hours, and Perkins said defenders need to assume that compression on the other side of the table. His prescription, per the episode summary, is a structural shift toward offensive cybersecurity: red-teaming, adversary emulation, and proactive bug-hunting funded as a line item rather than a side project.
Why it matters
April was already shaping up as an ugly month before this clip surfaced. A $600M monthly figure, if it holds across the major incident trackers, sits at the high end of what the industry has logged in any single month over the past two years. That's the context for Perkins' framing.
The argument isn't that hacks are new. It's that the marginal cost of a serious attack has dropped, and the people protecting hot wallets, bridges, and validator keys haven't restructured their budgets around that. There's also a regulatory read here.
Every nine-figure month feeds the case that custodians and DeFi protocols need prescribed security baselines, and US and EU policymakers have been circling that question since the Bybit and Ronin episodes. A record April hands them a fresh data point.