Crypto breaches hit 158,000 in 2025 as OKX Europe pushes shared security

Personal wallet and account breaches hit 158,000 incidents worldwide in 2025, according to Chainalysis, a jump that shows attackers drifting away from protocol exploits and toward phishing and credential theft aimed at ordinary users. OKX Europe CEO Erald Ghoos says that shift has exposed a gap the industry has been too comfortable leaving open.

Speaking on the security responsibility split between platforms and their customers, Ghoos traced the problem back to crypto's favorite slogan. In a statement, he said the principle of 'not your keys, not your coins' has 'too often functioned as a disclaimer, a way for platforms to hand users sovereignty and liability in the same breath.' That framing, he argued, no longer fits a market where millions treat digital asset platforms like banks and brokers.

The wider fraud numbers back up the concern. Ghoos cited European Banking Authority and European Central Bank figures showing payment fraud in Europe reached €4.2 billion in 2024, up from €3.5 billion a year earlier. Most of that hit traditional finance, but he flagged 'account takeover' — where an attacker grabs a user's credentials or device rather than cracking the platform — as a distinct risk that crypto firms can blunt with stronger default safeguards.

Ghoos pushed for recurring independent audits that actually test whether controls work, not just whether they exist on paper. OKX's European arm leans on SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 audits, ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018 certifications, PCI-DSS v4.0.1, and the Cryptocurrency Security Standard for key custody. 'This should be the baseline expectation, not a differentiator,' he said.

He also wants security teams to air their failures. OKX's Central Information Security team took a DEFCON exercise public in which engineers were told to break a production AI-based code scanner — and did, by flooding it with volume, hiding logic in unsupported file formats and planting misdirection. The fix: splitting reviews across independent reviewers with isolated context, requiring agreement before code clears. 'A security function that only ever reports good news isn't being tested hard enough,' Ghoos said.

On the user side, OKX points to OKX Shield, its account-protection program, with reimbursement starting at €100,000 and reaching €500,000 for customers hit by account takeover, sized to the safeguards they had switched on. Ghoos' closing argument: trust won't come from a product launch. 'Users shouldn't have to take a platform's security on faith. They should be able to see it for themselves.'