Study shows $3.63B stolen in crypto hacks

TLDR

A new CoinGecko study finds crypto platforms lost $3.63 billion to cyberattacks between January 2025 and July 2026, highlighting persistent security risk across the industry.

1. The report attributes $3.63 billion in losses to exchange, staking, and DeFi exploits, with a handful of large incidents accounting for most of the damage.
2. Most successful attacks exploited stolen passkeys, social engineering, and off-chain weaknesses, often bypassing completed security audits.
3. For crypto users, platform choice, key management, and growing use of AI-powered monitoring are now central to managing security risk.

Deep Dive

1. Study Scope And Findings

CoinGeckos latest report tallies $3.63 billion in losses from cyberattacks on crypto platforms between January 2025 and July 2026. It focuses on exchanges, staking services, and protocols rather than individual wallet thefts.

Three incidents dominate the total: Bybit reportedly lost about $1.4 billion in February 2025, staking platform KelpDao about $292 million, and Drift Protocol, a decentralized exchange, about $285 million. Many smaller exploits and security failures make up the remaining share.

Strikingly, about 60% of affected platforms had undergone independent security audits, and CoinGecko notes that many attacks hit areas those audits did not usually cover. The report also says that a large share of organized attacks are attributed to North Korean-linked hacker groups.

Confidence: high because these figures come from a compiled dataset of publicly reported and investigated incidents.

2. How Hacks Actually Happen

CoinGecko identifies stolen passkeys and access credentials as one of the most common entry points, reinforcing that human and operational weaknesses matter as much as on-chain code.

Broader data from other researchers show similar patterns. DeFi protocols have lost more than $1.3 billion to hacks in 2026, with compromised keys overtaking smart contract bugs as the leading attack vector.

Physical wrench attacks are also rising, where criminals use violence to force victims to surrender wallet access, with firms like CertiK and Chainalysis reporting dozens of such cases and around $30 million stolen in early 2026.

3. Signals To Watch Next

For everyday users, the main practical levers are where you keep funds and how you manage keys. Large balances on centralized platforms or poorly secured devices increase exposure if those platforms are compromised or if credentials leak.

For institutions and active traders, it matters whether venues invest in continuous security monitoring, incident response, and operational controls in addition to periodic audits, and whether they publish clear postmortems after exploits.

There is also a growing push to use AI and advanced analytics for real-time anomaly detection, which could reduce losses if widely adopted, but it will not eliminate the need for basic hygiene such as strong authentication and careful signing.

Conclusion

The $3.63 billion figure captures how concentrated and persistent crypto security failures remain, driven largely by stolen access rather than broken cryptography. For crypto users and platforms, reducing risk now hinges on better key management, stronger operational defenses, and treating audits as one tool among many, not a guarantee that systems are safe.