2025 Industry Violence Incident Review: 65 Physical Attacks, 4 Fatal Major Cases

Source:Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi

Compiled by｜Odaily (@OdailyChina); Translator｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Editor's Note: Remember the news not long ago about Russian crypto tycoon Roman Novak and his wife Anna being found dismembered and buried on a Dubai beach? In 2025, another dark undercurrent in the cryptocurrency industry is the increasing frequency of physical violence targeting holders, especially wealthy ones.

As a highly recognizable industry figure with his signature bald head, Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi today conducted a data analysis of violent incidents in the crypto space in recent years, explaining that the reason for writing this article is that "I'm getting increasingly scared." Data shows that a total of 65 violent incidents occurred in the industry in 2025, including 4 fatal cases — not only is the number of attacks rising rapidly, but the attacks themselves are becoming more violent. To this end, Haseeb also thoughtfully included some personal safety advice at the end of the article.

The following is Haseeb's full article, compiled by Odaily.

Are physical attacks targeting cryptocurrency holders on the rise?

Jameson Lopp has been quietly maintaining a database known as "wrench attacks" — incidents where cryptocurrency holders are coerced through violence to hand over their crypto assets. This is currently our closest source to "real-world baseline data" for determining whether holding crypto assets is becoming more dangerous over time.

I've been getting increasingly scared of such attacks lately, so I took Lopp's dataset and, using a somewhat Vibe Coding approach, created some visualizations to see what's really happening. Here are my findings.

You're not imagining things — the number of attacks is indeed increasing over time (65 incidents occurred in 2025). Furthermore, the attacks themselves are becoming more violent.

I asked Claude to categorize each attack into 5 levels, with the specific classification scheme as follows:

• Minor (3 incidents in 2025): Theft without direct confrontation, attempted theft, ATM/device theft.
• Moderate (9 incidents in 2025): Robbery involving some violence or assault, drugging, extortion.
• Severe (38 incidents in 2025): Armed robbery (gun/knife), kidnapping, armed home invasion.
• Extremely Severe (11 incidents in 2025): Kidnapping involving torture, dismemberment, severe beating, gunshot wounds.
• Fatal (4 incidents in 2025): Victim death.

As can be seen from the results, on average, the violence level per attack is continuously rising.

Geographically, Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region have seen the largest increases in violent incidents. North America remains the relatively safest region, but even there, the absolute numbers show an upward trend.

So, what is causing the rise in violent incidents?

The most intuitive explanation links the frequency of violent incidents to the growth of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization. Simply put — higher prices, more crime.

Let's look at the chart results: the white line represents the total cryptocurrency market cap; the colored areas represent the number of violent incidents.

A simple regression analysis yields an R² result of 0.45, meaning that 45% of the fluctuation in violent incidents can be explained by price alone. That is, as we mentioned earlier, when prices rise, violent incidents increase — I also ran regression analyses on other variables, but none were more explanatory than total market cap.

So, is it that simple? Is this enough to prove that the personal danger of holding cryptocurrency is becoming increasingly severe?

We can conduct another "stress test." Are there other hypotheses that could explain why the number of violent incidents is rising?

One possible explanation is that rising cryptocurrency prices themselves mean more people are holding crypto assets. In other words, the increase in criminal incidents might simply be due to "a larger population base," and the risk of violence faced by each individual may not have actually risen.

Let's run a sanity check on this. It's difficult to accurately measure the total number of cryptocurrency users, so I chose two proxy metrics:

• The first is Coinbase's monthly active users (MAU). Note: not cumulative registered users, as we want to exclude people who have churned and no longer hold coins.
• The second method is cruder: analyzing the number of violent incidents per unit of market cap to derive an approximate measure of the "probability of theft per dollar."

After normalizing this data, you see a completely different conclusion: the blue line represents the number of violent incidents per Coinbase user; the green line represents the number of violent incidents per dollar of wealth.

This data shows that 2015 and 2018 were actually the most dangerous times to hold crypto. That's right, while the number of attacks back then was far lower than today, the number of cryptocurrency holders was also much, much smaller.

From 2015 to 2025, Coinbase's monthly active users grew from 2 million to 120 million — a 60-fold increase — but violent incidents did not grow proportionally.

Of course, in recent years, the number of violent incidents per user has indeed risen, but the increase has been relatively moderate, roughly comparable to the level of violence in 2021, and significantly lower than pre-2019 levels. Meanwhile, the incidence of violent events per dollar of wealth has hardly changed.

We must also consider the alternative hypothesis of "reporting bias" — whether incidents are simply more likely to be reported — but that is beyond the scope of this analysis.

Overall, the number of violent incidents is indeed increasing, and the methods are becoming more violent, but this can be partly attributed to a "population effect," meaning that more people now hold cryptocurrency, so the risk faced by an individual user hasn't grown as dramatically as it might appear.

But ultimately, this isn't just an academic discussion. It's a truly serious, real-world issue.

If you belong to a high-risk group, there are many ways to improve your personal safety. Here are some standard offline safety recommendations:

• Try to live in a safe city, preferably in a residence with 24/7 security.
• Avoid wearing crypto-related clothing or anything that obviously suggests you hold crypto assets in public.
• Use services like DeleteMe to remove your personal information from data brokers.
• Apply for a PO Box and have all business mail sent there to avoid your home address being widely disseminated.
• Prepare a hot wallet with a sum of "money that can be handed over," completely isolated from your true cold storage assets.
• Diversify your funds: use multiple services, platforms, and devices to store assets so you don't lose everything at once in the worst-case scenario.
• Unless necessary, do not publicly broadcast your specific location in real-time, especially during crypto conferences.
• If you truly belong to an extremely high-risk group or are about to travel to a high-risk area, consider hiring private security — in some regions, this is far more useful than you might imagine.

2026 has arrived, and the Lunar New Year holiday is approaching. Please stay safe.