GoKawiilThe overwhelming majority of stolen cryptocurrency today is being used to fund the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Crypto theft is rampant because it's easy. The system, bereft of institutional safeguards by design, requires that individual participants secure their own assets — a task for which most are not particularly well-suited. The result: entire national GDPs worth of financial theft every year. Even just in 2025, in the US alone, including only known and reported cases, the FBI found that Americans lost more than $11 billion in crypto-focused scams run by cybercriminals such as gangsters in Southeast Asia.
The biggest winner of all, though, is the DPRK. According to data from TRM Labs, North Korean hackers have been responsible for at least around a third of all financial losses from cryptocurrency in six out of the past nine years. In 2026, though, they're doing their most productive work yet. By tallying up all of the money crypto traders have reportedly lost to hackers so far this year, analysts found that 76% is now in Pyongyang.
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It isn't that North Korea is performing 76% of all crypto cyberattacks. Rather, it has become proficient in focused, low-frequency, high-reward breaches, according to TRM.
Almost all of its winnings from January to April this year, for example, come down to two incidents: an attack against the "Drift Protocol" that yielded $285 million, and another against "KelpDAO" for $292 million.
TRM analysts believe that these semi-regular, high-yield attacks might be in part an outgrowth of North Korea's increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), helping it meaningfully upgrade reconnaissance and social engineering flows so that its attacks come out more perfectly baked.
The DPRK's Hundred-Million-Dollar Crypto Heists
Years ago, the Kim Jong-Un regime came upon an insight that forever changed the trajectory of both cyberspace and geopolitics. Though the hegemonic US could limit its access to global financial markets, the DPRK observed that with each passing day, largely unsophisticated and self-fashioned traders were converting more and more dollars, euros, and pesos into unregulated and insecure cryptocurrency networks.
Crypto was vulnerable to technical issues like any other digital systems were. Even better: thanks to its community's anarcho-capitalist dogma, stopping or reversing cryptocurrency theft typically involves moving mountains. A bank can kibosh a financial transfer to North Korea; cryptocurrency projects are often structurally designed to prevent anyone from doing that, and where it is possible and pressing, zealous investors often choose not to, even at the expense of their own wallets.
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