Crypto hacks climb 15% in August as $163M stolen across 16 incidents

Blockchain security firm PeckShield’s latest analysis shows that August crypto hacks and exploits went up by 15% from July. The security firm reported that more than $163 million in digital assets was stolen across 16 incidents.

According to PeckShield, the highlights of August crypto-related hacks included Turkish exchange BtcTurk, token launchpad ODIN.fun, lending protocol BetterBank, and CrediX Finance.

BtcTurk suffers two hacks in 14 months

On August 14, cybersecurity firm Cyvers detected unusual activity involving Ether and other tokens on several blockchain networks. At around 01:20 PM BST, Cyvers’ monitoring systems flagged large transactions on Ethereum, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Mantle, and Polygon. 

🚨ALERT🚨$48M worth of digital assets have been detected in unusual activity across multiple chains involving Turkish exchange @btcturk

About 30 minutes ago, our system detected multiple alerts across $ETH, $AVAX, $ARB, $BASE, $OP, $MANTLE, and $MATIC networks. Most funds were… pic.twitter.com/ss4a7O2hUd

— 🚨 Cyvers Alerts 🚨 (@CyversAlerts) August 14, 2025

“Our system detected multiple alerts across ETH, AVAX, ARB, BASE, OP, MANTLE and MATIC networks,” the company reported. Investigators said the attacker moved stolen assets into two addresses and began the laundering process by swapping them.

Almost 20 minutes later, BtcTurk suspended deposits and withdrawals by claiming there was a “technical issue” affecting its hot wallets. The exchange assured customers that local currency transfers and trading were unaffected, but did not confirm the total scale of losses. 

The hacking resulted in the theft of digital assets, including $48 million worth of Ether, according to Cyvers’ estimations.

In another incident of the month, dated August 19, a Bitcoin holder lost 783 BTC, worth roughly $91 million, in a social engineering attack. This coincidentally fell on the one-year anniversary of the $240 million Genesis Creditor hack. 

Blockchain security sleuth ZachXBT said the attacker tricked the BTC investor into thinking they were customer support for a hardware wallet provider, which compelled the former to disclose private wallet credentials.

The stolen Bitcoin was funneled through a Tornado Cash-like privacy tool called Wasabi Wallet, used to obscure the origins of illicit assets.

DeFi exploits listed with BetterBank attack

Over this past weekend, hackers drained about $5 million from PulseChain-based decentralized lending protocol BetterBank through a complex reward minting and liquidity manipulation attack. The perpetrators manipulated BetterBank’s ESTEEM reward system, which issued tokens when users provided liquidity for FAVOR. 

According to Web3 Security firm QuillAudits, the attackers created a fake ERC20 token paired with PDAIF, then manipulated trades through wash trading. Inflating ESTEEM rewards helped them convert the artificial supply into real assets, which inadvertently destabilized the pool.

“The attacker laundered stolen funds through swaps on PulseChain DEXes and later bridged about $922K worth of ETH to Ethereum, hiding their trail via Tornado Cash,” QuillAudits noted.

Odin.fun suffers $7 million liquidity manipulation

In another attack, hackers targeted Odin.fun, a memecoin launchpad platform, draining 58.2 BTC, worth around $7 million, in under two hours. Blockchain data from PeckShield shows the platform’s reserves plunged from 291 BTC to 232.8 BTC during the incident.

The exploit involved a liquidity pool manipulation in which attackers paired Bitcoin with a worthless token, SATOSHI. After exploiting the pool’s thin liquidity and inflating the token’s value through self-trading, they withdrew large amounts of real BTC at a fake price ratio.

Odin.fun co-founder Bob Bodily revealed the platform had faced an attack and admitted the platform’s treasury was not large enough to absorb the losses. He said the team was working on a “concrete plan” to compensate affected users and had initiated a full audit with a security firm. “We have ideas … we’ll share details as soon as they are finalized,” Bodily posted on X.

A Chainalysis report from July mentioned that the many crypto hacks in 2025  may be tied to Bitcoin’s price rise. 

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