Crypto Hacks Quadruple to $1.74B in 2025—Wall Street Still Calls It ’Growth’

Crypto’s security crisis just went parabolic. Hackers have already siphoned $1.74 billion this year—four times 2024’s $420M haul. Here’s how they’re doing it:

• Smart contract exploits: Still the golden goose, with cross-chain bridges as prime targets

• Insider jobs: The ’trusted team member’ attack vector is back with a vengeance

• Old-school phishing: Because why bother with zero-days when CEOs still click .exe files?

Meanwhile, VCs keep writing checks to ’security-focused’ chains that get drained within months. Maybe next year’s $5B hack will finally trigger some actual due diligence.

More money has been lost this year than all of last year

We are now four months into 2025, and according to Immunefi’s report, bad actors have carted away a whopping $1.7 billion from the crypto world so far.

The number looks large, and it is because the industry lost about $420 million around the same time. In essence, this year has been four times worse than 2024. The $1.7 billion that has been reported stolen within the first four months of this year is more than the total amount of money stolen in 2024, which totaled $1.49 billion.

This month alone, hackers got away with $92.5 million, which represents a 27% increase compared to what they stole last April, when they stole about $72.6 million. That is also more than the $41.4 million they stole in March this year, which means this month has been twice as bad as March.

The biggest losers of 2025

According to Immunefi, about ten projects got hit the hardest with hacks, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in most of the cases.

However, of those ten projects, two stand out for losing the most. They include UPCX, which lost up to $70 million, while KiloEx lost $7.5 million.

Other projects that lost money include Loopscale, ZKsync, and Term Labs, although their losses were limited relative to the biggest incidents, ranging from $84,100 to $5.8 million. Fortunately, some of the stolen funds were recovered thanks to the help of on-chain sleuths like ZachXBT.

According to the report, all the money carted away was lost to hacks rather than fraud. In fact, there was no single case of fraud reported, according to Immunefi.

As for the chains where these attacks went down, Ethereum leads the poll with five different attacks, while BNB endured only four attacks.

The total amount of money lost on both chains makes up 60% of all the stolen funds in April. Of course, they were not the only two chains hit. Other chains like Base, Arbitrum, Solana, Sonic, and zksync got hit too. However, the hacks happened less often compared to those on Ethereum and BSC.

The report also revealed that all the stolen funds came from the DeFi sector, while the CeFi sector recorded no losses in April.

Cryptopolitan Academy: Tired of market swings? Learn how DeFi can help you build steady passive income. Register Now