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

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This article is from: Dragonfly Managing Partner Haseeb Qureshi

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

Editor’s note: Do you remember the recent news about Russian cryptocurrency billionaire Roman Novakh and his wife Anna being found dismembered and buried on a Dubai beach? By 2025, another dark trend in the cryptocurrency industry is the increasing frequency of physical violence attacks against holders (especially wealthy individuals).

As a highly recognizable industry figure, Dragonfly Managing Partner and big bald head Haseeb Qureshi conducted a data review of violent incidents in the cryptocurrency space in recent years, explaining that he wrote this article because he is “becoming more and more afraid.” Data shows that in 2025, there were a total of 65 violent incidents in the industry, including 4 fatal cases — not only is the number of attacks rising rapidly, but the violence itself is becoming more severe. To address this, Haseeb also thoughtfully included some personal safety tips at the end of the article.

Below is the full text from Haseeb, translated by Odaily Planet Daily.

Are physical attacks on cryptocurrency holders increasing?

Jameson Lopp has been quietly maintaining a database called “wrench attacks” — incidents where cryptocurrency holders are forced to surrender their assets through violence. This is currently the closest source we have to “real-world benchmark data” for assessing whether holding crypto has become more dangerous over time.

Recently, I have been increasingly afraid of these attacks, so I took Lopp’s dataset and visualized it with a vibe coding approach to see what’s really happening. Here are my findings.

You are not imagining things — the number of attack incidents is indeed increasing over time (a total of 65 in 2025). Moreover, the attacks are becoming more violent.

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

• Minor (3 incidents in 2025): theft without confrontation, attempted theft, ATM/device theft.

• Moderate (9 incidents in 2025): robbery with some violence or assault, drugging, extortion.

• Severe (38 incidents in 2025): gun/knife robbery, kidnapping, home invasion with firearms or blades.

• Extremely severe (11 incidents in 2025): kidnapping with torture, dismemberment, severe beating, gunshot wounds.

• Fatal (4 incidents in 2025): victims died.

From the results, we see that, on average, the violence level of individual attacks is steadily increasing.

Geographically, the increase in violent incidents is most pronounced in Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. North America remains relatively the safest area, but even there, the absolute number is trending upward.

So, what is causing the rise in violent incidents?

A straightforward explanation is linking the frequency of violence to the overall market cap of cryptocurrencies. Simply put — the higher the price, the more crime.

Look at the chart: the white line represents the total market value of cryptocurrencies; the colored area shows the number of violent incidents.

A regression analysis shows an R² of 0.45, meaning 45% of the fluctuations in violent incidents can be explained solely by price. As previously mentioned, rising prices correlate with more violence — I also ran regressions with other variables, but none were more convincing than total market cap.

Is it that simple? Does this prove that the personal risk for crypto holders is increasingly serious?

We can do a “stress test” and consider alternative hypotheses to explain the rising number of violent incidents.

One possible explanation is that rising crypto prices mean more people are holding assets. In other words, more crimes may simply be due to a larger population of holders, not necessarily an increase in individual risk.

Let’s examine this reasoning. Accurately measuring the total number of crypto users is difficult, so I chose two alternative indicators:

First, Coinbase’s monthly active users (not total registered users, to exclude those who have left or no longer hold assets);

Second, a rough measure of violent incidents per unit of market value, estimating the “probability of theft per dollar.”

After standardizing these data, you will see a completely different conclusion: the blue line indicates the number of violent incidents per Coinbase user; the green line shows violent incidents per dollar of wealth.

This data suggests that the most dangerous periods for holding crypto were actually 2015 and 2018. Yes, the number of incidents then was far fewer than now, but the number of holders was also much smaller.

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

Of course, in recent years, the incidents per user have increased somewhat, but the rise has been relatively mild, roughly comparable to the violence level in 2021, and significantly lower than pre-2019 levels. Meanwhile, the rate of violent incidents per dollar of wealth has remained almost unchanged.

We also need to consider the alternative hypothesis of “news reporting bias” — that such incidents are simply more likely to be reported — but that is beyond this article’s scope.

Overall, the number of violent incidents has indeed increased, and the methods are becoming more brutal, but this can partly be attributed to “population effects”: now that more people hold cryptocurrencies, individual risk doesn’t seem to be increasing as dramatically as it appears.

But, ultimately, this is not just an academic discussion. It’s a 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 tips:

• Try to live in a safe city, preferably with 24/7 security at your residence;

• Avoid wearing crypto-related clothing or obvious signals indicating you hold crypto assets in public;

• Use services like DeleteMe to remove your personal information from data brokers;

• Apply for a PO Box to send all business mail there, avoiding widespread exposure of your address;

• Prepare a hot wallet with “spendable money” completely isolated from your cold storage assets;

• Diversify your funds: use multiple services, platforms, and devices to store your assets; in the worst case, you won’t lose everything at once;

• Avoid publicly broadcasting your real-time location unless necessary, especially during crypto conferences;

• If you are in a very high-risk category or about to go to a high-risk area, consider hiring private security — it can be more useful than you think.

2026 has arrived, and with the end of the year and the upcoming long holiday, please stay safe.