As the market soared in July, crypto hacks also saw a significant increase from the previous month, with crypto exchanges losing over $100 million in the past 30 days. This follows a concerning trend that has been developing this year, which suggests that theft from digital asset services could reach a new milestone by the end of 2025.
Crypto Exchanges Lose $114 Million In July
On Friday, security firm PeckShield noted that the total losses from crypto hacks reached $142 million in July, with crypto exchanges topping the list. CoinDCX, GMX, and BigONE recorded 80% of the total losses.
Notably, Indian exchange CoinDCX suffered the highest loss of the month after a security breach on July 19 resulted in the transfer of $44 million in USDT from one of the platform’s wallets to six unknown personal wallets.
Hackers were able to access the crypto exchange’s system after compromising an employee’s login credentials. Recent reports revealed that the employee was allegedly lured into a fake job task and persuaded to download and use his CoinDCX-designated laptop to complete tasks, unsuspectingly downloading files with malware.
Meanwhile, Perpetual and spot crypto exchange GMX recorded the second-largest hack of the month after losing around $42 million on July 9 when an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the protocol’s first version on Arbitrum.
GMX V1’s vault contract had a vulnerability that allowed the attacker to manipulate the GLP token price through the system’s calculations, resulting in approximately $42 million worth of assets being transferred from the GLP pool to an unknown wallet.
Nonetheless, the incident saw a happy ending after the hacker accepted a white-hat bounty and returned most of the funds. As reported by NewsBTC, the exploiter returned $10.49 million worth of FRAX and 10,000 ETH, valued at $30 million, on July 11.
2025 Alarming Trend Continues
Based on data from PeckShield’s previous reports, Q2 showed a diminishing trend in total crypto losses, with May and June recording 40% and 56% month-on-month (MoM) declines, respectively.
However, the short-term trend changed in July as the total value of stolen funds surged 27.2% from June’s $111.6 million. Additionally, the total number of major incidents slightly increased by 13.3%, from 15 registered incidents in June to 17 hacks in July.
This follows a broader trend developing this year, as Chainalysis explained on its “2025 Crypto Crime Mid-Year Update.” In the report, the on-chain analytics firm revealed that crypto theft this year has been “more devastating” than the entirety of 2024, with over $2.7 billion worth of funds stolen from crypto services in the first half.
By the end of June, more value had been stolen year-to-date (YTD) than during the same period in 2022, suggesting that theft from crypto services could potentially increase another 60% by year’s end.
Additionally, YTD activity shows a steeper trajectory into the end of the first half, with an alarming velocity and consistency, than in previous years. For reference, 2025 required 142 days to hit the $2 billion mark in value stolen from platforms, while 2022 reached this volume in 214 days.
“If this trend continues, we could see 2025 end with more than $4.3 billion stolen from services alone,” the report forecasted.
