Six Years, More Than $16 Billion Gone

Crypto theft is no longer a phase that the digital asset industry is slowly getting out of but an industry unto itself. To this point, over the past half a decade alone, onchain sleuths have counted ballooning stolen totals ($3.7 billion in 2022, $1.7 billion in 2023, $2.2 billion in 2024, and $3.4 billion in 2025), figures that have shown no signs of stopping.

In fact, it bears mentioning that nearly half of last year’s total came from a single event, i.e. the February 2025 Bybit hack, in which attackers compromised the exchange’s cold-wallet signing process and walked away with $1.5 billion (making it the largest crypto theft in history).

The first half of this year was eerily similar,…