The primary half of 2025 uncovered deep vulnerabilities within the crypto business, with hackers stealing over $2.1 billion throughout 75 separate incidents.
This marks a ten% enhance from the earlier H1 file of $2 billion in 2022 and almost matches the full-year determine for 2024, which closed at $2.2 billion, based on a report from blockchain intelligence agency TRM Labs.
This uptick in losses was primarily pushed by a single occasion. An enormous $1.5 billion exploit concentrating on Bybit in February accounted for almost 70% of all crypto thefts in H1 2025.
Nonetheless, even outdoors of that breach, a number of months, specifically January, April, Might, and June, every recorded over $100 million in damages from particular person assaults.
In the meantime, had the Bybit hack not occurred, whole losses from these incidents may need landed nearer to $600 million, the bottom mid-year determine since 2023.
TRM Labs additional famous that hack sizes grew considerably throughout the reporting interval. In accordance with the agency, the common theft in H1 2025 reached almost $30 million, double the $15 million common recorded throughout the identical interval final 12 months.
Infrastructure assaults dominate
The majority of 2025’s crypto hacks stemmed from structural weaknesses in how digital asset methods are constructed and accessed.
TRM Labs said that assaults involving stolen personal keys, compromised seed phrases, and manipulated front-end interfaces have been liable for over 80% of stolen funds.
These infrastructure-based breaches typically exploit belief gaps and inside vulnerabilities, permitting dangerous actors to grab management of platforms or redirect funds with out triggering normal alerts.
In the meantime, DeFi good contracts weren’t spared both. Protocol-level assaults, comparable to re-entrancy exploits and flash mortgage manipulations, comprised round 12% of recorded incidents.
These typically goal logic flaws in decentralized functions, demonstrating that even well-audited code stays inclined below complicated monetary operations.
State-backed hackers
In accordance with the report, geopolitical motivations additionally performed a visual function within the rising business’s escalating threats.
The blockchain safety agency famous that North Korea-linked teams proceed to dominate the scene and have been behind roughly $1.6 billion of whole stolen belongings in H1 2025, together with the Bybit hack.
This determine underlines the Asian nation’s continued reliance on crypto theft to assist state initiatives. TRM Labs identified that these assault campaigns are related to funding packages that embody army and nuclear growth and broader efforts to evade world sanctions.
In the meantime, different state-linked actors are rising as effectively. In June, a hack attributed to Gonjeshke Darande, allegedly related to Israel, focused Iran’s high crypto trade, Nobitex, siphoning over $90 million.
The attackers reportedly claimed the operation aimed to disrupt Iranian efforts to bypass monetary restrictions. Notably, the stolen belongings have been despatched to unusable blockchain addresses, suggesting the assault was designed extra as a political assertion than a profit-driven heist.
These developments recommend that digital asset theft is more and more changing into a tactical instrument in worldwide disputes.
