Crypto guards report increased interest in their services in the middle of the growing frequency of the so-called “$ 5 attacks” against cryptocurrency traders, investors and project managers.
In the past year, several leading key attacks – physical attempts to steal someone’s crypto – have targeted investors and business leaders in the blockchain industry.
The Mantra Crypto of “not your keys, not your pieces” has lost its power among certain investors who fear for their personal security. Cold portfolios can provide total control over digital assets, but also have a single attack point.
As the adoption of the crypto grows and the key attacks persist with the proliferation of crypto investors of high value, the guards see a passage from the preference of the auto-customary to institutional control.
Crypto key attacks stimulate security demand
Key attacks are not new. Jameson LOPP, Bitcoin lawyer (BTC) and Bitcoin Wallet Casa technology director published a Github benchmark that has recorded hundreds of these incidents since 2014 – and these are only those reported in the news.
Over the past two to three years, when the adoption of cryptography has accelerated and has become more common than ever, attacks have become more public and sophisticated. In January 2025, the founder of Crypto Wallet Ledger and his wife, David and Amandine Balland, were kidnapped, taken to separate places and held in Ransom.
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A few months later, the daughter of a founder of the exchange barely fought the attackers who tried to remove it in a van in the streets of Paris. The concerns about the increase in attacks and their similar methods led the French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau to meet cryptocurrency professionals to discuss the issue.
As the concern about these attacks increases, cryptographic guards notice an increase in interest in their services.
Emma Shi, director of over -the -counter and institutional sales of Hashkey, who offers childcare and exchange services, told Cintelegraph: “We absolutely see that the increase in retail anxiety result in significant entries.
Shi said that Hashkey’s daycare activities have noted an increased interest in storage of “families, individuals with high crypto-native shuttle and even those who have nest eggs that are large enough to be vulnerable to theft”.
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Cold portfolios have long been praised by the defenders of cryptography in order to give investors a total control over their assets and to keep them as much as possible offline. However, this unique key also provides a “unique failure point”, by Wade Wang, CEO of Multipsy Computation (MPC) Crypto-Custody Service Safeheron.
Wang said there was a “flight to security” among cryptography investors, where holders “actively seek innovative solutions that eliminate this unique point of failure to considerably increase the bar for the attack”.
Already in 2023, a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers on the state of the digital guard noted the challenge that cold wallets were subject to theft or loss. A solution made in the report was MPC or the multisignure portfolio options.
Can childcare services stop key attacks?
The self -customary of cryptography, while winning a new technology, encounters the same problem as treasure holes through history – they were vulnerable to physical attacks and theft until they could share this risk with a stronger and safe institution as a bank. Flying a bank is much more difficult than stealing a person.
In the same way, cryptographic investors now seek to “increase the cost” of the key attack to $ 5. Wang said investors wanted to “return to the fundamental principle: exponentially increasing the cost of an attacker.
Keeper of third parties can achieve this and alleviate the problem of key attacks, adding time locks and layers of approval and displacement of an individual’s target to the goalkeeper’s employees.
“But this is not an optimal solution,” according to Wang. Confidence is still placed in a single centralized institution and, as evidenced by recent violations of Coinbase and Bybit, even large regulated cryptography companies are vulnerable to misconduct and phishing of employees.
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Wang suggested that distributed custody, such as MPC, “is a higher solution because it fundamentally solves the problem. The central MPC principle is to use technology to decentralize the control point and single risk […] in a “multipartite” structure.
In such a system, control does not belong to any person and the transfer of funds requires complex consensus protocols of several parts.
Decentralized solutions can better reflect the ethics of the blockchain industry, but “we cannot neglect the advantages of centralized guards,” said Wang. “Reliable safety measures provide better assurance of protecting customer assets, a familiar way to do things for many new cryptography players.”
Centralized or decentralized, crypto investors, could always be in danger if the public image of cryptographic investors is that they all walk around with cold wallets full of bitcoin.
Shi said: “Risk perception is also important. The attackers often assume that holders of storage of funds, therefore the consciousness of the public that more crypto takes place in guardian solutions can dissuade opportunistic assaults. ”
WRENCH attacks a “temporary problem” solved by adoption
Public perception changes indeed. Retail investors are increasingly making a cryptographic part of their portfolio, according to a 2024 report by Ernst & Young. New regulations on major financial markets such as the EU and the United States create the necessary executives for institutional investors to get involved.
This regulatory change was also good for the guard industry, because it “legitimizes professional custody for daily investors and leads to more offers not only of crypto-native companies but also traditional banks,” said Shi.
“We note that the adoption of the crypto is accelerating in the regions with a regulatory clarity, which creates completely new childcare considerations for investors who previously based solely on self-cuir solutions.”
Regulations also increase the challenges of key attacks, by Wang. Better regulatory executives with more jurisdictions “establishing in a proactive manner of robust regulations” “will inevitably lead to more serious actions of application of the law, which will considerably increase the cost of these attacks and will basically limit these behaviors”.
“We consider physical attack as a temporary challenge,” concluded Wang.
The cryptography industry has evolved through many stages, but the rise of attacks against investors and eminent executives shows that it has not yet reached the maturity of traditional financial markets.
In the meantime, the leaders move not only their assets to centralized and decentralized guards, but also muscles. Personal security companies have also seen an increase in the interest of the crypto elite to protect their homes and their people.
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