Where Stolen Crypto Really Goes: Inside the 45-Day Laundering Machine

Key Takeaways

• Chainalysis logged $3.4B stolen in 2025, with Bybit’s $1.5B hack alone accounting for 44% of that total.
• H1 2026 set a record 212 incidents per Blockaid, with Lazarus-linked crews behind about 55% of these losses.
• KelpDAO’s $293M April exploit was 2026’s largest single hit.

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, adding roughly $1.1 billion across a record 212 incidents, per security firm Blockaid. The largest single hit was the April 19 exploit of restaking protocol KelpDAO (at $293 million), and TRM Labs counted 207 incidents over these six months, more than double the same period a year earlier.