The cryptocurrency industry navigated a turbulent 2025, with hackers successfully draining US$2.78 billion from various platforms throughout the year.
According to the 2025 Cryptocurrency Market Report by Finbold, which utilised data from blockchain security firm SlowMist, while the headline figure remains high, the year was defined by a massive early shock followed by a steady stabilisation of the security landscape.
The Bybit breach: A massive outlier
The most significant event of the year was the Bybit hack, a single incident that accounted for US$1.5 billion in losses. This breach alone represented more than half of all stolen crypto funds for the entire year, dramatically skewing the annual risk profile.
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The incident was traced back to a wallet compromise, highlighting that centralised custody and key management remain critical points of failure. While the industry has made significant strides in smart contract security, the Bybit case proves that centralised infrastructure continues to pose a systemic risk when safeguards fail.
Beyond this significant event, other notable losses were distributed among a small number of high-impact incidents, including attacks on Cetus Protocol, Balancer V2, LIBRA, and Nobitex. These breaches were caused by a variety of factors, including contract vulnerabilities, logic flaws, rug pulls, and security lapses.
From chaos to control: A front-loaded year
A closer analysis of the quarterly data reveals that the threat of cybercrime was not persistent, but rather overwhelmingly front-loaded in the first quarter.
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- Q1: Losses reached approximately US$1.78 billion, primarily driven by the Bybit incident, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the annual total.
- Q2: Losses dropped sharply to roughly US$465 million.
- Q3: The downward trend continued, with losses falling to just over US$300 million.
- Q4: The year ended on its most positive note, with total hack-related losses falling below US$230 million—the lowest quarterly figure of the year.
Wallets vs. smart contracts
Despite the ongoing emphasis on smart contract auditing within the Web3 ecosystem, wallet-related breaches proved to be the most financially devastating attack vector in 2025. The dominance of the Bybit breach highlights how failures in custody infrastructure can lead to substantial losses, even as decentralised protocols adopt more robust security frameworks. While contract vulnerabilities and logic flaws remained a threat, their cumulative impact was notably smaller than that of wallet compromises.
The path forward for 2026
The sharp slowdown in the latter half of 2025 suggests a maturing market with improving security discipline. The absence of large-scale breaches in the final quarter points towards more cautious capital deployment and fewer exploitable concentrations of value.
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Finbold’s analysis suggests that 2025 was less a year of escalating crime and more a period of adjustment. As the industry advances, the trend indicates that early security shocks have given way to tighter controls and a reduced frequency of exploits, marking a period of gradual improvement for the digital asset ecosystem.
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