Violent “wrench attacks” on crypto holders, physical robberies and kidnappings aimed at forcing victims to hand over coins, appear to be increasing in absolute terms and trending, according to a new theory developed from a long-term event database maintained by security researcher Jameson Lopp.
Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi said he analyzed Lopp’s dataset and built an interactive dashboard to stress test a question many traders and developers have been asking silently for years: is holding crypto too physically dangerous? “You don’t think this: the number of attacks has been increasing over time,” Qureshi wrote in X. “Not only that, the attacks are becoming more and more violent.”
The dashboard divides incidents into five severity bands – Minor, Moderate, Critical, Severe, and Fatal and the distribution is heavily skewed towards the sharper end of the spectrum. Of the 269 reported cases, 137 (51%) were labeled “Severe,” 57 (21%) “Severe,” and 13 (5%) “Fatal,” with the remainder divided between 39 (14%) “Moderate” and 23 (9%) “Minor.”
The year-by-year bars show recent years carrying a greater proportion of “Severe” and “Dangerous” outcomes than the early history of the dataset, with 2025 appearing as the highest incidence year on the chart.
Qureshi’s analysis also puts a number on a more understandable driver: price. Charging events against the value of the crypto market, reported a slight decrease with an R² of 0.45 – which means that about 45% of the variance of the reported violence is explained by the market cap alone. In plain words, higher values correspond to more attacks.
But the most important question for everyday owners is not raw statistics; it is dangerous for the individual. Because comprehensive data on the “number of crypto users” is difficult to pin down, Qureshi used Coinbase’s monthly active users as a proxy, as well as the average incidence of market average attacks per dollar of wealth.
The resulting “normalized attack rates” chart tells an indirect story: the attack rate per user increased in the earlier periods of the market (especially around 2015 and 2018), then decreased sharply after 2019, before peaking in the later observations. “So that’s it?” Qureshi asked. “Crypto evidence becomes more physically dangerous?”
According to him, it is not. Coinbase MAUs, he noted, increased significantly during the decade, while the average attack rate did not increase proportionately, suggesting a meaningful “human impact” behind the high total of headlines. However, the per user line has risen from its post-2019 decline, likely returning to the levels seen during the 2021 cycle, as the “attack per $ of market cap” line remains relatively low in recent years.
Geography adds another layer of discomfort. The regional table on the dashboard shows Western Europe (73 attacks) and North America (64) as the two largest buckets in terms of the number of incidents, while Asia-Pacific is also strong (53). But the collection of the most deadly results elsewhere: Latin America shows a death rate of 21% and Africa 17%, compared to 0% in North America. Qureshi emphasized that point directly: “Remarkably, there were 0 deaths in North America,” he wrote, adding that the “lion’s share” of the killings were in Latin America and Africa.
Lopp, who has maintained an underground “Bitcoin Wrench Attack” archive for years, warned the workload and frequency are difficult to treat as isolated incidents. “When an event goes from being rare to happening every few days, it doesn’t matter anymore – it’s just a fact of life,” he wrote on Dec. 21 posts cited in music, while inviting others to help maintain the database.
At the time of publication, the total crypto market is at $3.12 trillion.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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