Crypto Losses More than $3.1B in 2025 as Hackers Change Strategies
The cryptocurrency market has suffered more than $3.1 billion in losses during the first half of 2025 which are again the result of security problems such as smart contract bugs, poor access control, rug pulls, and all other sorts of scams as reported by the blockchain security company Hacken.
This figure has already gotten beyond the total of $2.85 billion that was recorded as the entire 2024 year’s losses. Although the February hacking of Bybit which cost $1.5 billion was one of the incidents that made the whole sector look bad in terms of security, it was just one of the many hacking incidents within the cryptocurrency sector.
The major reason for talking about the same money losing trend of 2022 is that the security weaknesses in the cryptocurrency sector are still the same, with access-control breaches being the largest reason, which accounted for about 59%. Smart contract defects were responsible for approximately 8% of the loss that amounted to $263 million.
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Changing the targets
With the advancements in crypto and blockchain technology, the hackers have turned from looking for weak coding to targeting human mistakes and process failures. Errors and weaknesses in the processes are the primary prompts for the hackers to adopt such methods, which are:
- Blind signing attacks
- Leakage of private keys
- Intricate phishing scam
As per Hacken, terrible operational security was the main factor contributing to the losses in the first half of 2025 amounting to $1.83 billion which was the case for both decentralized (DeFi) and centralized (CheFi) exchanges.
The Cetus incident in the second quarter of 2025 was the most significant attack. In under 15 minutes, $223 million was taken. This marked the end of a five-quarter period of declining DeFi hacks and made the second quarter of 2025 the worst for DeFi losses since early 2023.
In the past, particularly in Q4 2024 and Q1 2025, technical bugs were not so much of a problem compared to access-control issues, which led to most crypto losses. However, during Q2 2025, access-control losses in DeFi dropped to only $14 million which is the lowest since
