Violent “wrench assaults” towards crypto holders, bodily robberies and kidnappings meant to drive victims handy over cash, look like rising in absolute phrases and trending extra extreme, in keeping with a brand new visualization constructed from a long-running incident database maintained by safety researcher Jameson Lopp.
Dragonfly companion Haseeb Qureshi mentioned he analyzed Lopp’s dataset and constructed an interactive dashboard to stress-test a query many merchants and builders have been asking quietly for years: is solely holding crypto changing into bodily extra harmful? “You’re not imagining it: the variety of assaults has been growing over time,” Qureshi wrote on X. “Not solely that, the assaults are getting extra violent.”
The dashboard breaks reported incidents into 5 severity bands — Minor, Average, Critical, Extreme, and Deadly and the distribution skews closely towards the sharp finish of the spectrum. Of 269 categorized incidents proven, 137 (51%) have been labeled “Critical,” 57 (21%) “Extreme,” and 13 (5%) “Deadly,” with the rest cut up between 39 (14%) “Average” and 23 (9%) “Minor.”
The year-by-year bars present the later years carrying a bigger share of “Extreme” and “Deadly” outcomes than the early historical past of the dataset, with 2025 showing because the highest-incident 12 months on the chart.
Qureshi’s evaluation additionally places a quantity on probably the most intuitive driver: worth. Charting incidents towards complete crypto market capitalization, he reported a easy regression with an R² of 0.45 — implying roughly 45% of the variation in reported violence is defined by market cap alone. In plain phrases, greater costs coincide with extra assaults.
However the extra consequential query for on a regular basis holders just isn’t uncooked counts; it’s danger per particular person. As a result of complete “variety of crypto customers” information is difficult to pin down, Qureshi used Coinbase month-to-month energetic customers as a proxy, and individually normalized incidents by market cap to approximate assaults per greenback of wealth.
The ensuing “normalized assault charges” chart tells a much less linear story: per-user assault charges spiked in earlier market eras (notably round 2015 and once more in 2018), then fell sharply after 2019, earlier than ticking greater in the latest observations. “So is that it?” Qureshi requested. “Proof crypto is changing into extra bodily harmful?”
On his telling, not fairly. Coinbase MAUs, he famous, expanded dramatically over the last decade, whereas normalized assault charges didn’t rise proportionally, suggesting a significant “inhabitants impact” behind the upper headline totals. Nonetheless, the per-user line has moved up from its post-2019 lows, roughly again towards the degrees seen through the 2021 cycle, even because the “assaults per $ of market cap” line stays comparatively flat in recent times.
Geography provides one other uncomfortable layer. A regional desk within the dashboard exhibits Western Europe (73 assaults) and North America (64) as the 2 largest buckets by incident depend, with Asia-Pacific additionally substantial (53). However probably the most deadly outcomes cluster elsewhere: Latin America exhibits a 21% fatality fee and Africa 17%, versus 0% in North America. Qureshi underscored that time immediately: “Notably, there have been 0 fatalities in North America ever,” he wrote, including that the “lion’s share” of fatalities are in Latin America and Africa.
Lopp, who has maintained the underlying “Bitcoin Wrench Assault” archive for years, has warned the workload and frequency have gotten tougher to deal with as remoted incidents. “When an occasion goes from being uncommon to occurring each few days, it’s now not newsworthy — it’s only a reality of life,” he wrote in a Dec. 21 submit cited within the thread, whereas inviting others to assist keep the database.
At press time, the overall crypto market cap stood at $3.12 trillion.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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