CipherTrace: the amount of cryptocurrencies stolen from exchanges tripled to $761M in the first half of 2018 compared to all of 2017, may reach $1.5B this year
Three times more cryptocurrency was stolen from exchanges in the first half of 2018 than all of 2017, with a corresponding boost …
Context & Ripple Effects
This mid-2018 CipherTrace estimate was the first installment of what became a running series: six months later the firm reported full-year 2018 thefts and scams at $1.7B, overshooting its own $1.5B projection by more than 200 million dollars. The H1 2018 tripling of exchange theft to $761M is therefore not an outlier but the opening data point in a seven-year escalation curve.
The same company monetizes the problem it measures — it raised a $27.1M Series B for crime-tracking and compliance tooling and claims a Monero-tracing capability — so each report doubles as marketing for the analytics category it anchors.
First-order effects
- Exchanges absorb the direct losses and face immediate pressure on custody and security budgets, since the $761M figure shows 2017-era defenses failing against a tripling attack volume.
- Demand rises for CipherTrace's tracing and compliance tools, the product line its Series B funding was raised to build out.
Second-order effects
- Rival analytics firms enter the measurement business — Chainalysis and TRM Labs now publish competing theft estimates, turning crypto-crime data into a contested market rather than one vendor's research.
- Regulators gain a quantified harm number to cite; CipherTrace's follow-up finding that US-exchange cross-border payments rose 46% over two years gave policymakers a flow-based argument alongside the loss figures.
Third-order effects
- Exchange theft has become a permanent multi-billion-dollar annual category — from this $761M half-year figure to $2.7B stolen in 2025 alone, including the $1.4B Bybit breach — making security spend a structural cost of operating an exchange rather than an incident response.
- The measurement layer itself consolidates power: whoever tracks illicit flows (CipherTrace, then Chainalysis and TRM) shapes how regulators and banks price crypto risk, entrenching the legitimacy gap between compliant venues and the rest.
The trend: Cryptocurrency theft has grown from episodic exchange breaches into a persistent multi-billion-dollar annual drain, with an entire analytics industry now built around measuring and policing it.