Record crypto hacks drive rush to cold storage wallets

Ledger, which makes USB-style cold-storage devices, said 2025 is its “best year yet,” with revenues in the “triple-digit millions” as users move assets off exchanges and hot wallets that were hit by credential thefts and front-end exploits. Chief executive Pascal Gauthier said customers are reacting to the fact that “we’re being hacked more and more every day,” and that mainstream phones and laptops “were not designed for security,” pushing both retail holders and companies to upgrade to dedicated signing hardware. Ledger, last valued at $1.5bn in 2023, now secures around $100bn in assets and is preparing another fundraising, possibly via a U.S. listing.

The buying spree comes after several headline attacks in 2025, including the $1.5bn theft from Bybit in February that blockchain-analytics firms tied to North Korean operators, and a series of wallet-draining incidents that, for the first time, hit large numbers of individual users — Chainalysis said about 23% of 2025’s stolen funds came directly from personal wallets, an “increasingly significant” share. Because those attacks bypassed exchange custody and went straight for private keys, security teams say the market is now treating cold storage and secure-signing devices as the default for long-term holdings. 

With MiCA custody provisions and UK FCA warnings pushing platforms to tighten consumer-protection controls, some corporates and family offices in the EU are opting to keep high-value coins in their own hardware-secured environments instead of leaving them on a single venue. Alongside the usual Q4 retail bump — Black Friday and Christmas — they are now seeing institutional-style orders for hardware security modules (HSMs) and multi-party computation (MPC) appliances that can plug into trading and treasury workflows, letting firms approve on-chain transfers without exposing keys to internet-connected machines.

Other wallet makers, including Czech-based Trezor and Swiss provider Tangem, said they are benefiting from the same trend as users look for air-gapped or card-style devices that cannot be drained by a browser exploit. Analysts tracking the sector estimate the global hardware-wallet market at about $475–680mn in 2024–25, with forecasts of multi-billion-dollar sales by the early 2030s as crypto becomes part of corporate balance sheets and as more banks offer tokenized assets that still need cold key storage.