Crypto has lost $26.9 billion to hacks since 2017 while earning $47 billion in on-chain revenue, which works out to 57 cents stolen for every dollar made.
This is according to data shared by Lorenzo Valente, the director of research at ARK Invest, who pointed out that security has so far been a costly weakness for the industry.
Binance Hack Pushes 2026 Losses Above Revenue
Valente’s analysis compared revenue data from Token Terminal covering 27 of the largest crypto projects with hack losses tracked by DefiLlama from 2017 to date, and the annual figures showed that on-chain revenue was generally higher than theft between 2021 and 2025.
It was the same in 2017, but between 2018 and 2020, more value was lost to hacks than crypto projects earned, 2020 being the worst year as the industry made about $1 billion but lost $4 billion to attackers.
Per the data, crypto generated $12.5 billion in 2021, while hackers stole about $2.9 billion. The next year, bad actors made off with $3.6 billion, but the digital asset sector earned $3 billion more than that. In 2023, while on-chain revenue dipped to about $4.6 billion, the value lost to hacks also dropped drastically to $1.6 billion, the lowest since 2021. That number then went up by about $100 million to $1.7 billion the year that followed, but again, crypto revenue soared to around $9 billion.
In 2025, the industry earned about $8.9 billion, and $2.7 billion was lost to theft, but 2026 has so far been the worst ever year for losses. Up to now, hackers have made off with $8.7 billion, with the $6.3 billion stolen from Binance at the end of October making up the bulk of that amount, and, according to Valente, it also wiped out this year’s on-chain revenue, estimated to come in at around $5.6 billion.
The researcher concluded with a blunt assessment:
“Security is the bottleneck.”
When the Binance theft happened, the exchange said that an attacker may have used a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop to reach a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals. Later, co-CEO Richard Teng added some new information, posting on X that the attack had not been a single “one-click” action, with Binance finding “additional points of breach.”
What Has Happened Since the Binance Breach
Of the $6.3 billion that had been stolen, “blockchain partners,” including Tether and Circle, managed to freeze about $3 billion on-chain, most of it in stablecoins. The exchange also promised to make whole those that had been affected by the incident, as it absorbed the full financial impact using its SAFU funds, corporate treasury, and related reserves. Withdrawals, which Binance temporarily halted, resumed in phases from November 1.
Meanwhile, the FBI, alongside several blockchain security firms, claimed that TraderTraitor, a group allegedly linked to the North Korean regime, was behind the hack. However, Pyongyang was quick to distance itself from the incident, instead accusing the United States of political provocation and insinuating that if anything, the US stood to benefit the most from the stolen funds if they were recovered, since it could add them to its national strategic reserve.
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