According to a report released by blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs on Thursday, hackers stole $2.1 billion from the cryptocurrency industry in the first half of 2025, with over 80% of the losses stemming from infrastructure attacks.
TRM states that attack methods such as private key theft, mnemonic vulnerabilities, and front-end hijacking are usually implemented through social engineering or internal personnel permission leakage, resulting in an average loss of 10 times that of other types of attacks. At the same time, vulnerabilities in DeFi (decentralized finance) systems remain a problem. Lightning loans and smart contract re-entry attacks accounted for another 12% of the losses, indicating that there are still widespread security risks in on chain protocols.
This six-month data almost equalizes the total hacker losses for the entire year of 2024 and is about 10% higher than the historical record for the first half of 2022. It is worth noting that a major event that occurred in February significantly increased the overall number: the $1.5 billion hacking attack on Bybit, which TRM attributed to North Korea. This single event has pushed the average loss per hacker attack to $30 million, almost double last year's. TRM estimates that organizations related to North Korea stole $1.6 billion, accounting for 70% of the total amount in the first half of the year.
