After a year of kidnappings, attacks and armed burglaries targeting cryptocurrency holders, the industry is racing to shore up its defenses.
Security is being tightened at the conference. Private companies that provide services to cryptocurrency holders report a surge in demand. The exchange is protecting its executives.
This defensive posture was on display last month at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, where many of the most high-profile speakers were followed through the venue by personal bodyguards. A standing-room-only workshop taught attendees how to protect their crypto assets during a burglary. Justin Doochin, events director for conference organizer BTC Inc., said the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Venetian resort security team, outside contractors and private security personnel worked together to provide protection.
A few weeks ago at Paris Blockchain Week, guests attended a VIP dinner escorted by a police convoy, with organizers increasing security during the two-day event.
Read more: Cryptocurrency traders seek extra security as kidnappings rise
The technology’s defined transparency, which its followers have long viewed as a structural improvement over traditional financial opaque pipes, serves the same function as allowing criminals to identify targets.
According to statistics, physical attacks against cryptocurrency holders increased by 75% in 2025, with 72 confirmed incidents and known losses of $41 million. Data sorting Developed by blockchain security company CertiK. The number is widely believed to be an underestimate, and kidnappings and ransom demands are often settled privately. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Bitcoin hosting company Casa, maintains an independent public database that tracks a roughly threefold increase in known so-called spanner attacks between 2023 and 2025.
Read more: Cryptocurrency high rollers hire bodyguards to thwart kidnappers
Coinbase Global Inc., the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, spent about $7.6 million on CEO Brian Armstrong’s personal security in 2025. That’s an increase of more than 20% from the previous year and more than the CEO security charges typically disclosed by major Wall Street banks, according to the company’s proxy filing.
Phil Ariss, director of public sector relations at TRM Labs UK, said: “People are thinking harder about how to keep critical assets physically and operationally away from day-to-day equipment and day-to-day work.”
At the Vegas conference, which attracts thousands of attendees, many high-profile speakers are accompanied by private security. One of them is Adam Back, who recently According to the New York Times Buck denies this claim and believes that he may be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Safety is a central theme. One of the most attended workshops focused on protecting crypto assets under physical duress. The event was hosted by Ben Perrin, who runs a Bitcoin Security YouTube channel with around 400,000 subscribers. Solutions range from technical safeguards to practical measures, including setting up decoy wallets, enabling coercion features on hardware wallets, and using time locks to prevent immediate transfers under duress.
“Unfortunately, we can’t exclude ourselves from the list,” Palin said, referring to leaked exchange data that was used to identify targets. “So how do you protect against that? People want self-sovereignty, but they want to do things right and they’re worried they’re going to mess up.”
The founder of a major crypto protocol said he has moved his digital asset holdings from self-custody on-chain wallets to physical vaults at four independent institutions, spreading his crypto across them as an extra layer of security. Each required his personal signature and a seven-day lock-in period before withdrawals could be made. Now it will take him a month to get the full amount. He declined to give his name, citing the risk of being identified by his kidnappers.
inflection point
“2025 marks a clear inflection point: physical violence is now a core threat vector in the crypto ecosystem,” CertiK said in the report.
France has become a particular hotspot. A series of incidents in 2024 and 2025 targeted families of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, including a failed kidnapping attempt on the daughter of the CEO of Paris exchange Paymium. Industry experts say law enforcement in Paris and New York have stepped up efforts to combat a rise in crypto-related kidnappings and extortion cases, while private security firms in Dubai report growing concerns about the threat.
In most documented cases, attackers have identified the markers in advance. Public blockchain records, leaked exchange data and chain analysis tools (available to both investigators and criminals) combine to produce a clear map of who owns what.
“Low risk, high return on investment”
“From an adversarial perspective, the logic that bad actors see is – this is low risk, high ROI,” said Adam Healy, CEO of Station70, a U.S. security company focused on digital asset protection. “If they’re cleaned properly, they can get away with a lot of it.”
The need for protection has increased dramatically. Two years ago, Executive Risk Services, an executive protection and risk management firm serving the digital asset industry, received contact from potential clients about once a quarter. Now, inquiries come about once a week.
The corporate response is beginning to resemble the executive defense budgets of Big Oil or pharmaceutical CEOs in the late 1990s under animal rights threats. Cryptocurrency exchange Gemini spent about $2.5 million each on providing personal security services to its billionaire co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in 2025, documents show. As of January, Gemini entered into a new agreement to protect the Winklevoss brothers and their families (and others in need) for $400,000 per month (plus fees), though that number will be capped at $1 million for the first year, according to recent regulatory filings.
TRM’s Aris said: “Large regulated exchanges and custodians are increasingly adopting practices that look very close to what the big banks have for a small group of key personnel, such as administrative protections for a small number of individuals, secure travel protocols, hardened offices and internal policies regarding home addresses and children’s schools not being publicly visible.”
The face-to-face element is not limited to extraction. It has also been at the front end of some of the biggest protocol hacks in the industry. On April 1, hackers stole approximately $285 million from Drift, a derivatives exchange on the Solana blockchain. The company later described the attack as “six months in the making.” According to Drift, thieves posed as legitimate trading companies, met with employees at industry conferences, deposited more than $1 million to establish credibility, and embedded themselves in projects for months before compromising employee devices with malware disguised as wallet applications.
Drift blamed the hack on a North Korean state-affiliated group, an assessment echoed by blockchain analytics firms Elliptic and TRM Labs.
The founding proposition of cryptocurrencies is that financial sovereignty can be restored to individuals by eliminating intermediaries and anchoring wealth in cryptographic keys rather than institutional relationships. This proposal has been established. The result is that the key, and the person holding it, now becomes a single point of failure. There are no bank branches to call and no regulators to appeal to. Stolen keys are the final deal.
“Criminals will go after where they think the money is,” Healy said. “Many individuals associated with cryptocurrencies combine significant wealth with uniquely difficult threat environments.”
Photo: A person types on a backlit keyboard in Danbury, England, Thursday, January 7, 2021; Photo Credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
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