Cryptocurrency Security Crisis in July 2025
The ongoing security crisis in the cryptocurrency realm steepened in July 2025, with theft losses from hacks soaring by 27.2% to a staggering $142 million, up from $111.6 million in June. This surge is marked by significant breaches targeting both exchanges and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, as indicated by data from PeckShield.
Major Breaches and Attacks
Leading this troubling trend was a significant internal attack on India’s CoinDCX, resulting in losses of $44.2 million, while GMX fell victim to a $42 million re-entrancy exploit but managed to recover a majority of the stolen funds through a white-hat hacker collaboration.
The breach at CoinDCX, which occurred on July 19, was traced back to compromised login credentials used by a software engineer named Rahul Agarwal, who was arrested amidst suspicions of his involvement.
Investigations revealed that Agarwal’s actions were linked to a WhatsApp call from Germany concerning a potentially malicious file. Evidence showed that at 2:37 AM, unauthorized access to the system was gained as a test transaction of 1 USDT was made. Several hours later, hackers executed the large-scale theft, spreading the stolen funds across six different wallets.
Cybersecurity analysts from Cyvers have connected this breach to North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group, drawing parallels with a previous hack that resulted in the loss of $234 million from WazirX in 2024. The tactics employed saw the hackers extract funds methodically and transfer them quickly to obscure recovery efforts.
During police questioning, Agarwal confessed to receiving roughly $17,131 in deposits from unidentified sources over the preceding year, which he claimed were payments for freelance work. This incident coincided with speculation regarding a potential acquisition of CoinDCX by Coinbase, a rumor subsequently denied by CEO Sumit Gupta.
GMX Exploit and Recovery
Meanwhile, GMX fell victim to a sophisticated re-entrancy vulnerability on July 9, resulting in a $42 million loss. The attacker exploited this security weakness within GMX’s V1 contracts to manipulate the average BTC short prices, thereby inflating the value of GLP tokens. The hacker later returned about $40.5 million—including 10,000 ETH—after negotiating a white-hat agreement, while retaining a bounty of $5 million.
Notably, the hacker converted a significant portion of their stolen funds into 11,700 ETH, which appreciated in value and generated an additional profit of about $3 million.
Reacting to the exploit, GMX temporarily halted trading on Avalanche and disabled GLP minting on Arbitrum as part of their response strategy to the incident. The platform has committed to transitioning V1 positions to a reimbursement pool, urging forks of V1 protocols to implement immediate security measures.
Other Notable Incidents
Other major hacking incidents in July included significant losses at BigONE exchange, which faced a $28 million compromise due to supply chain vulnerabilities, WOO X losing $12 million to a phishing scheme, and Future Protocol with a $4.2 million theft. The BigONE incident involved attackers altering server operations affecting account management and risk protocols.
Overall Impact on Cryptocurrency Security
The robust rise in hacking incidents in July further exacerbated an already troubling 2025 for cryptocurrency security, which has seen an overall loss exceeding $2.2 billion in the first half of the year through 344 individual breaches. Wallet breaches have accounted for roughly $1.7 billion of these losses across 34 occurrences, while phishing scams have drained about $410 million over 132 separate attacks.
Additionally, reports indicate a rise in physical violence related to cryptocurrency ownership, with 32 “wrench attacks” recorded worldwide thus far in 2025—a surge that threatens to surpass the 36 incidents noted in 2021. Nearly one-third of these assaults have occurred in France, where aggressors are increasingly targeting family members of crypto holders.
In total, the average loss per incident reached approximately $7.1 million, with recovery efforts yielding $187 million through various collaborations with law enforcement and exchanges—yet, net losses for the initial half of 2025 stand at around $2.29 billion, already exceeding the entire figures for 2024.
