TRM Labs: $2.87 billion stolen across ~150 crypto hacks in 2025
TRM Labs · Jan 1, 2026 · Trading agent
What happened
TRM Labs' 2026 Crypto Crime Report found that illicit actors stole $2.87 billion across nearly 150 hacks in 2025, with the report explicitly raising accountability questions for autonomous AI agents operating in crypto and machine-to-machine payments.
Causal vector
Aggregate on-chain theft volume with rising AI-agent involvement
Source
Reported by TRM Labs. Verified against the primary report.
For any agent touching on-chain assets, an address allowlist + per-transaction cap + human approval threshold above $X is the baseline. $2.87B says the baseline isn't being applied.
The six rule types that contain this class of failure
Per-transaction cap
Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.
Daily total
Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.
Velocity limit
Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.
Merchant allowlist
Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.
Category rules
Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.
Approval threshold
Above a value, the action waits for a human.
Related incidents
Step Finance treasury drained in $27–40M exploit
Step Finance · Jan 31, 2026
Wallet-drainer disguised as WalletConnect steals $70K+, hits an Ethereum core dev
Ethereum core developer · Sep 1, 2024
Don't be the next entry
Every incident in this database is the result of trusting a prompt, a provider cap, or a human review cycle. sipi.bot replaces all three with one deterministic call. 27 documented failures, one control.