Crypto Losses Near $3.4b As Hackers Went ‘big Game Hunting’ 2025
Three major incidents accounted for the majority of crypto losses in 2025, while upgraded security across DeFi protocols managed to keep hackers at bay, according to Chainalysis.
Crypto hackers focused on large crypto entities and personal crypto wallets this year, resulting in $3.4 billion in crypto losses in 2025 — the highest figure since 2022.
Just three hacks in 2025, led by the $1.4 billion hack of crypto exchange Bybit, accounted for 69% of all losses from January through to early December, a Chainalysis report released on Thursday found, with the largest attacks a thousand times larger than the typical incident.
Andrew Fierman, the head of national security intelligence at Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph that while massive attacks drove this year’s uptick in losses, it’s unclear if 2026 will unfold in the same way.
“It’s difficult to predict if it will get worse in 2026, as hacks are very outlier-driven — one or two big hacks can set records for a given year. But what I can say is that this trend of big game hunting seems to be continuing, and there’s no reason to believe hacks will decline next year,” he said.
Meanwhile, Fierman said that on the opposite end of the spectrum, personal wallets have also become a popular target for hackers.
They represented 7.3% of the total stolen value in 2022 and 44% in 2024. This year it’s around 20%, but ignoring the Bybit hack, the total would have been closer to 37%.
However, the overall amount stolen from individual hacks declined from $1.5 billion in 2024 to $713 million this year, despite the number of incidents nearly tripling compared to 2022.
“These amounts are smaller because individual personal wallets tend to hold less funds than large exchange wallets, which pool many users’ funds together,” Fierman added.
DeFi total locked value is around $119 billion, according to the analytics platform DefiLlama, more than double from 2023 lows when it dropped to below $40 billion.
Source: CoinTelegraph
