Paca

2025 and 2026 were pure extraction. THE VERIFIED DISASTER TIMELINE OF CRYPTO: 2025 + 2026 UPDATE, AS OF MARCH 23, 2026 (Or: how to explain to your partner where the gambling money went) 2025 closed with about $3.35B in hacks, scams, and exploits by @CertiK count, while @chainalysis and @MastrXYZ estimated about $17B+ in scams and fraud. ➡️ January 2025 🔺 Trump linked tokens $TRUMP and $MELANIA launch, pump violently, then dump after insider and fee extraction 🔺 $TRUMP runs from under $10 to roughly $74.59 before collapsing hard 🔺 Political meme coin trading fees linked to the launch are estimated in the $86M to $100M range 🔺 Fake political launchpads steal millions from retail 🔺 China cracks down on offshore OTC desks, distorting global liquidity 🔺 Phemex exchange hacked for about $69M to $70M 🔺 Total January hack losses exceed $73.9M ➡️ February 2025 🔺 $LIBRA launches on Solana, peaks near $4B market cap, then crashes below $400M after roughly $99M in insider withdrawals 🔺 AI deepfake Trump scam videos go viral 🔺 Bybit loses $1.5B, the largest exchange hack in crypto history, later linked to North Korea and Lazarus 🔺 Cetus Protocol exploited for about $220M 🔺 Phishing and social engineering theft exceeds $600M 🔺 February becomes the single most catastrophic month of the year ➡️ March 2025 🔺 Political meme tokens collapse after insider wallets are exposed 🔺 Telegram impersonators drain millions 🔺 UPCX hacked for $70M 🔺 First major bridge hacks freeze user funds 🔺 KiloEx oracle manipulation confirmed 🔺 Q1 losses already move into extreme territory, proving the cycle is extraction first, utility second ➡️ April 2025 🔺 Solana rugpull season accelerates with thousands of dead tokens 🔺 Sahil Arora is exposed and later admits to mass celebrity rug operations 🔺 Fake audits and AI generated whitepapers dominate presales 🔺 Mantra / OM collapse wipes out $500M+, driven by liquidation pressure and team supply concerns 🔺 OM loses roughly 90%+ in about 1 hour 🔺 China expands crypto data censorship, creating offshore price gaps ➡️ May 2025 🔺 Solana presale rugs escalate 🔺 Cross chain hacks disrupt multiple networks 🔺 GMX V1 drained for about $40M to $42M 🔺 Coinbase hit by a social engineering data breach, expected cost roughly $180M to $400M 🔺 Oracle manipulation triggers multiple DeFi collapses 🔺 $WLFI launches with massive hype, then rapidly dumps 🔺 Cetus fallout deepens, with about $220M to $223M drained and about $162M later frozen ➡️ June 2025 🔺 Smaller Layer 1 chains suffer validator slashing events 🔺 Users lose staked funds 🔺 Multiple small stablecoins permanently lose their peg 🔺 Nobitex exchange hacked for about $90M, linked to the Israel aligned Predatory Sparrow operation 🔺 AI powered hacks rise over 1,000% YoY 🔺 H1 confirmed hack losses exceed $2.17B 🔺 Depending on methodology, H1 losses land around $2.28B to $2.37B ➡️ July 2025 🔺 Daily DeFi protocol exploits continue 🔺 Fake presale sites perfectly copy real ones 🔺 SlowMist confirms over $2.37B in H1 exploit losses 🔺 Total crypto scams exceed $2.1B in the first half of the year 🔺 GMX exploit becomes another example of old design assumptions breaking under pressure ➡️ August 2025 🔺 Fake launchpads on Solana, Base, and Ethereum continue stealing funds 🔺 Wallet drainer popups bypass security prompts 🔺 MEV bots exploit swaps during congestion 🔺 783 BTC stolen in a single Bitcoin phishing attack, worth about $91M 🔺 BtcTurk hot wallet breached for about $48M to $50M 🔺 Human compromise keeps outperforming pure code exploits ➡️ September 2025 🔺 Fake wallet update popups drain thousands of wallets 🔺 CEX market makers exposed for coordinated wash trading 🔺 Fake hardware wallets leak private seeds 🔺 Political token fundraising evolves into a repeatable extraction model 🔺 $WLFI starts trading and quickly weakens, reinforcing the merge of politics and retail extraction ➡️ October 2025 🔺 The Binance anomaly event destroys the market 🔺 430 USDT pairs affected 🔺 103 pairs trade more than 30% below all other exchanges 🔺 Over 30 pairs trade more than 100% below competitor lows 🔺 Historic liquidation cascade wipes out entire sectors, with about $19B in total liquidations 🔺 Bitcoin crashes from about $122k to $104k 🔺 Binance later compensates affected users by about $283M 🔺 China halts fiat gateways again 🔺 Trump issues a presidential pardon for CZ, shocking the industry and confirming the political capture optics ➡️ November 2025 🔺 Institutional wash trading confirmed across multiple CEXs 🔺 Political tokens return in new structures and crash again 🔺 Small stablecoins depeg under stress 🔺 Roughly $1T wiped out across total crypto market capitalization 🔺 By some tallies, the wipeout reaches about $1.2T within roughly 6 weeks from the October peak 🔺 Bitcoin drops over 30% from the yearly high 🔺 The market starts repricing trust itself, not only price ➡️ December 2025 🔺 Trust in centralized exchanges hits historic lows 🔺 Validator failures cause multi chain outages 🔺 Offshore liquidity dries up under geopolitical pressure 🔺 Yearn Finance exploit triggers massive capital destruction, about $9M via the yETH infinite mint bug 🔺 The attacker mints an absurd amount of yETH while depositing only 16 wei 🔺 Cloud mining scams dominate retail losses 🔺 Year end closes with systemic fatigue, broken trust, and exhausted liquidity ➡️ January 2026 🔺 Truebit Protocol exploited for about $26.4M via an integer overflow flaw in a 5 year old unupgraded smart contract 🔺 TRU token effectively nuked, collapsing nearly 100% 🔺 Record single victim phishing and social engineering hit, with 1 investor losing about $282M to $284M through a sophisticated Trezor / Ledger impersonation scam, including fake support letters and QR codes stealing seed phrases 🔺 Theft includes about 1,459 BTC and 2.05M LTC 🔺 Step Finance treasury wallets compromised for about $27M to $40M via executive device and private key exposure 🔺 Project affiliates including SolanaFloor and Remora Markets are ultimately shut down 🔺 Multiple Ledger customer data leaks via third party processors fuel more targeted phishing 🔺 Total January losses land around $370M to $400M, the highest monthly total in over 1 year 🔺 More than 71% of January damage comes from phishing and social engineering 🔺 The single whale phishing hit accounts for nearly 75% of the monthly total ➡️ February 2026 🔺 Losses plummet about 87% to roughly $49.3M 🔺 Step Finance impact spills over into early February 🔺 Smaller incidents include YieldBlox at about $10M, IoTeX ioTube at about $8.8M, and CrossCurve at about $3M through an Axelar message spoofing related exploit 🔺 Continued wallet drainers, address poisoning, and AI powered scams 🔺 No mega hacks, but the structure is still broken 🔺 Security improvements become visible only relative to the carnage of 2025 and January 2026 ➡️ March 2026, through March 23 🔺 Resolv Labs USR stablecoin exploited on March 22 🔺 Attacker uses a compromised private key to mint about 80M unbacked USR 🔺 Roughly $23M to $25M drained in ETH value 🔺 USR depegs catastrophically, from $1 to as low as $0.025 to $0.27 depending on venue and pool depth 🔺 Protocol immediately paused 🔺 Ongoing smaller wallet drains across EVM chains continue, with root cause still under investigation in several cases 🔺 Lazarus linked infrastructure compromises reported, including Bitrefill 🔺 About 18,500 purchase records reportedly exposed in that compromise 🔺 Persistent phishing, fake support campaigns, and cloud or frontend outages spike during volatility MAJOR EXTRA EVENTS 2025 TO 2026 🔺 Pumpfun extracts over $1B+ in cumulative revenue while producing thousands of rug tokens and disposable launches 🔺 Political token fundraising becomes a fully operational extraction model 🔺 AI scams and deepfake fraud explode across all platforms 🔺 2025 closes with roughly $3.35B to $3.4B in hacks, scams, and exploits by security firm tallies 🔺 Broader scams and fraud estimates move toward $17B 🔺 State linked actors, sanctions evasion networks, professional laundering pipelines, and industrial scale impersonation define the cycle 🔺 Early 2026 confirms the shift: human and operational attacks, phishing, key compromise, exec device hacks, malicious signatures, and cloud weak points increasingly dwarf pure smart contract exploits 🔺 Legacy contracts, multisig weaknesses, and cloud provider dependencies continue causing outages and drains Well friends: 🔺 2025 was 12 months of continuous extraction 🔺 Insider abuse, political capture, fake innovation, and mass manipulation defined the year 🔺 The machine did not stop on January 1, 2026 🔺 January reopened with another $370M to $400M bloodbath 🔺 February cooled to about $49.3M, but only after unprecedented damage 🔺 March’s Resolv depeg proved that stablecoin and DeFi infrastructure can still break from 1 compromised key 🔺 Trust in CEXs, bridges, old contracts, multisigs, cloud layers, and even hardware wallets remains near historic lows 🔺 State actors, Extractors, Trump linked insider trades, AI tools, fake support flows, phishing kits, and sophisticated social engineering keep winning Have fun or LFG.... By $MASTR investigation.