Crypto’s Bloody Quarter: Q1 2025 Sees $1.93B Vanish in Record-Breaking Hacks

Hackers just had their best quarter ever—unfortunately, it came at crypto’s expense. $1.93 billion evaporated in Q1 2025, smashing previous records. Here’s how they did it.

• DeFi Drainage: Exploits targeting unaudited protocols accounted for 68% of losses—because who needs security audits when you’ve got ’code is law’ bravado?

• Bridge Bandits: Cross-chain bridges remained the crypto equivalent of leaving a vault door open, with $600M stolen in three headline-grabbing attacks.

• Institutional Ignorance: Despite ’enterprise-grade’ security promises, custodial services lost $300M—proving Wall Street’s crypto plays are just as hackable as your cousin’s hot wallet.

Regulators are already sharpening their knives, but let’s be real—this is the same industry where ’not your keys, not your crypto’ somehow coexists with ’yield farming on unaudited forks.’ The only surprise? That the numbers aren’t higher.

“Contract exploits remain the most persistent and lucrative attack method in the cryptocurrency environment,” the report says.

Compromised private keys are in second place (9 cases, $140 million in losses), followed by rug pull fraud schemes — there were only two of them, but they took $290 million (14.82%).

Centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs) suffered the largest losses, accounting for $1.54 billion, or 79.56% of total losses. This confirms that CEXs continue to be the primary targets for technically prepared attacks.

In comparison, other segments suffered the following losses:

• Tokens: $290 million (14.86%);
• DeFi, payment platforms, credit protocols: less than 5% of total losses;
• NFT, gaming, and metaverse: symbolic but reputationally sensitive targets.

In turn, $1.44 billion of the stolen funds (more than 74%) were attributed to North Korea. All other hacker groups combined stole only $0.45 billion, despite the higher number of attacks.

“This underscores the DPRK’s highly sophisticated, state-sponsored approach to hacking infrastructure for financial gain,” the experts said.

Despite the sanctions imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in 2022, as well as numerous attempts at regulatory pressure, the Tornado Cash cryptomixer remained the most popular money laundering tool, used in 53.33% of all cases.

After the sanctions were lifted by a US court decision in 2024, its use only increased, which indicates the ineffectiveness of regulating Immutable smart contracts.

In addition, the report indicates that an average of 43.83 hours elapse between hacking and public disclosure, and stolen funds reach their target addresses in less than 68 hours.

According to the Global Ledger, the stolen $1.55 billion remains unspent, creating opportunities for partial recovery and investigations.

We would like to remind you that scam tokens have helped fraudsters to gain more than $857.5 million amid the hype around the OFFICIAL TRUMP (TRUMP) memecoin.

Сообщение Crypto hacks for $1.93 billion: Q1 2025 broke records for losses появились сначала на INCRYPTED.