In 2024, hackers stole $2.2B in crypto across 303 hacks, up from $1.8B across 282 hacks in 2023; in H1 2024, $1.58B had been stolen, but the pace slowed in H2
The Chainalysis 2025 Crypto Crime Report — Crypto hacking remains a persistent threat, with four years in the past decade individually seeing …
Context & Ripple Effects
Chainalysis's midyear reading had already put losses at $1.58B in the first seven months of 2024, making the full-year total a confirmation that the surge persisted even as the second-half pace eased.
The 2024 result also sits within a longer pattern of large crypto thefts, later eclipsed when H1 2025 losses surpassed all of 2024 following the Bybit breach. The arc matters because incident frequency rose alongside dollar losses, not merely the size of isolated attacks.
First-order effects
- Crypto services, their users, and affected counterparties absorb $2.2B in reported 2024 thefts across 303 hacks, versus $1.8B across 282 incidents in 2023.
- The slowdown in H2 lowers the annual run rate relative to H1, but does not reverse the year-over-year increase in both losses and hack count.
Second-order effects
- The rise in incident count pressures crypto platforms to treat security exposure as a recurring operating risk rather than an exceptional event, especially after the sharp H1 increase signaled the scale of the problem early.
- A higher volume of hacks can widen the gap between crypto's mainstream-facing ambitions and the security record that customers and counterparties must assess.
Third-order effects
- If losses continue to rise across more incidents, crypto market infrastructure is likely to face sustained pressure to make security, custody, and incident response central points of competition and trust.
- The pattern reinforces the crypto legitimacy gap: broader use can increase the importance of whether the ecosystem can contain persistent theft rather than simply recover from headline breaches.
The trend: Crypto's expansion is being accompanied by a persistent security-and-trust challenge, with hack frequency and losses remaining material even when quarterly theft rates cool.