Crypto ‘Wrench Attacks’ are on the rise and becoming increasingly violent

Crypto violence is on the rise around the world, but Western Europe and APAC are seeing the biggest increases. North America, on the other hand, remains relatively safer.

Physical attacks on crypto users, also known as “key attacks,” have increased over time. The incidents are also becoming more violent on average.

But Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi found that the recent increase in violence per user is similar to 2021, but remains well below the pre-2019 risk.

Crypto wealth and violence

In a detailed tweet, Qureshi, who referenced Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp’s long-running database, said: revealed that the number of recorded attacks has increased over time and that the severity of those attacks has also increased. He explained that each incident was divided into five severity levels, ranging from minor to fatal, and that the average reported attack has become more violent over the years.

Broken down by geography, Qureshi said Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region have experienced the largest increases in violence, while North America remains the safest region overall, although it has still seen an increase in the absolute number of incidents.

Qureshi then explored possible explanations for the rise, starting with cryptocurrency market capitalization. He said that a simple regression comparing violent incidents to the total crypto market capitalization yielded an R-squared value of 0.45, meaning that about 45% of the variation in reported violence can be explained by price alone, supporting the idea that higher crypto prices attract more crime.

He added that other signals were tested, but none were as predictive as raw market cap. However, Qureshi emphasized that this does not necessarily mean that crypto becomes more dangerous per person. He proposed an alternative explanation: As prices rise, more people own crypto, which could lead to more overall crimes, even if the underlying risk per user remains the same.

To test this, he used Coinbase’s monthly active users as a benchmark for the number of active crypto holders and also normalized attacks based on total market cap as a rough measure of violence per dollar of wealth. According to Qureshi, crypto appears to have been more dangerous in earlier years, such as 2015 and 2018, when the user base was much smaller.

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He noted that Coinbase’s MAUs grew from about 2 million in 2015 to about 120 million in 2025, a 60-fold increase, while violence did not increase at the same rate. While there has been a recent increase in the number of violent events per user, Qureshi says it is moderate and roughly in line with 2021 levels. This is still significantly lower than before 2019, and that violence per dollar market cap has hardly changed.

High-end wrench attacks

A number of serious attacks were reported in 2025. In January, Ledger co-founder David Balland was kidnapped from his home in France in a wrench attack and held for ransom for about 24 hours. According to reports, Balland and his wife were taken to a nearby town and the attackers cut off one of his fingers to pressure associates to pay a ransom before French authorities secured their release.

In another case, a US resident visiting London was targeted after being lured into the wrong vehicle while waiting for an Uber outside a nightclub. The victim, identified as Jacob Irwin-Cline of Portland, Oregon, was later tricked into smoking a cigarette believed to be laced with scopolamine. While disabled, he unknowingly gave attackers access to his crypto accounts and ultimately lost approximately $72,000 worth of XRP and $50,000 worth of BTC before being abandoned in an unknown area.