2025 Marks Worst Year on Record for Crypto Theft as Losses Exceed $4 Billion

The scale of crypto-related theft reached unprecedented ranges in 2025, with losses exceeding $4.04 billion, in keeping with PeckShield’s annual safety report.

This escalation underlines the rising sophistication of assaults and the growing safety challenges going through the cryptocurrency business.

2025 Crypto Security Report Reveals Rising Losses and Declining Asset Recovery

2025’s determine marks a 34.2% improve in comparison with the $3.01 billion stolen in 2024 and a rise of roughly 55% from 2023’s $2.61 billion.

Despite a lower within the whole variety of crypto-related safety incidents in 2025, the general worth of stolen belongings elevated sharply. This signifies a shift towards fewer however higher-impact assaults.

“2025 has witnessed a record-breaking yr for crypto-related theft, pushed primarily by systemic vulnerabilities in centralized infrastructure and a strategic shift towards focused social engineering,” PeckShield wrote.

The Crypto Security Annual Report confirmed that exploits remained the dominant assault vector, accounting for 66% of whole losses. These incidents, typically involving good contract flaws, compromised private keys, or infrastructure breaches, resulted in roughly $2.67 billion in stolen belongings, representing a 24.2% year-over-year improve.

Scams accounted for the second-largest share of losses. PeckShield reported that $1.37 billion was misplaced to scam-related exercise in 2025, marking a 64.2% improve in comparison with the earlier yr.

The report additionally highlighted the rising position of social engineering techniques, together with phishing and impersonation, which accounted for 12% of whole losses. Unlike technical exploits, these assaults primarily rely on manipulating users relatively than exploiting weaknesses in blockchain code.

Recovery efforts lagged behind the dimensions of losses. Only about $334.9 million value of stolen crypto was recovered or frozen in 2025, considerably decrease than the $488.5 million recovered in 2024. The decline displays the rising sophistication of laundering strategies.

PeckShield Lists 2025’s Largest Crypto Heists

The report outlined the ten largest crypto-related thefts recorded in 2025. Losses from these circumstances ranged from tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to properly over $1 billion. Notable incidents embody:

• Bybit: The largest theft on record within the crypto business, with North Korea’s Lazarus Group stealing over $1.4 billion from the change.
• Libra Token: A high-profile rug pull that resulted in investor losses of around $251 million.
• Cetus Protocol: This decentralized change working on the Sui blockchain lost over $200 million in a single assault.
• Nobitex: Iran’s largest cryptocurrency change reportedly suffered losses of approximately $81.7 million after Gonjeshke Darande (Predatory Sparrow) exploited it.

Meanwhile, month-to-month information revealed that losses had been inconsistently distributed all year long. February was the worst month for crypto theft in 2025, with $1.77 billion misplaced, primarily as a result of Bybit hack. By distinction, October recorded the bottom month-to-month losses of the yr, with crypto theft totaling roughly $21.6 million. Yet, the determine climbed in November.

These developments seem like carrying over into 2026. Just 13 days into the brand new yr, the crypto business has already fallen sufferer to 2 main exploits. The first was the Truebit exploit, adopted by a social engineering assault that focused customers of the funding platform Betterment.

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