(NewsNation) – A type of criminal activity known as “wrench attacks,” in which robbers physically coerce people into handing over their cryptocurrency holdings, is on the rise, according to crypto security firm CertiK.

Nik Seetharaman, the CEO of cyberdefense company Wraith Watch, recently told Nexstar’s NewsNation that he believes the increase in wrench attacks can be partly attributed to people flaunting their wealth online, which he noted makes it easier for criminals to identify and track down people with a lot of money.

“In the crypto community especially, you have this culture of, you know, flaunting your assets and … posting pictures of yourself in (places like) Ibiza and Bali,” Seetharaman explained.

He also pointed to improvements in digital security that make it so criminals “have no option but to basically hold you at gunpoint and say, ‘Enter your password into this phone right now or bad things are going to happen to you or your family.’”

NewsNation local affiliate KTLA reported that experts also say the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies and the ability to transfer large sums in irreversible transactions make large account holders vulnerable to bad actors.

How big an issue are wrench attacks?

The name “wrench attacks” was popularized by an online comic that mocked how easily high-tech security can be undone by hitting someone with a wrench until they give up passwords, according to The Associated Press.

CertiK released a report in May detailing global instances of wrench attacks, which showed that between January and April 2026, it identified 43 incidents resulting in victims losing more than $101 million in cryptocurrency.

The firm said those incidents represent a 41% increase over the same period last year, and if the rate continues, “2026 will close with approximately 130 incidents and several hundred million dollars in losses.”

In 2025, CertiK tracked only 81 attacks that resulted in victims losing approximately $52 million, further indicating that wrench attacks are a growing issue.

Wealthy California crypto holders targeted in recent attacks

In November 2025, a San Francisco man was robbed of $13 million in digital currency after thieves posing as pizza delivery drivers forced their way into his home, bound him with duct tape, beat him with a firearm and threatened to cut off his fingers, KTLA reported, citing The San Francisco Chronicle.

Three attempted wrench attacks in Sunnyvale, San Jose and Los Angeles that occurred in the days and weeks following the San Francisco home invasion appear to be linked.

Potential wrench attack in Nancy Guthrie case?

NewsNation contributor and former FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer believes Nancy Guthrie, the mother of “Today” host Savannah Guthrie, who has been missing for more than 100 days, could have been the victim of a wrench attack.

Coffindaffer wrote on X Tuesday that she has been “speaking about a Wrench Attack that took place literally about 90 minutes North of Nancy’s house the day before Nancy was attacked since early March.”

Guthrie was last seen at her home on Jan. 31 in Pima County, near Tucson, Arizona. She is believed to have been abducted, and investigators are scrutinizing messages that have been sent to media outlets, possibly from kidnappers, at least one of which made a bitcoin ransom demand.

Separately, TMZ received a series of communications from a person claiming to know who the kidnapper is, and that individual has demanded a $100,000 cryptocurrency payment.

NewsNation local affiliate KTLA, NewsNation’s Sean Noone and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Still Some Time To Go Till The Bears Retreat

Bitcoin’s bear market may still have a year or more to run, according to Cryptoquant founder and chief executive Ki Young Ju, who spelled out the timeline in a post on X. “Once profit-taking cascades, Bitcoin investors’ PnL typically falls for about 18 months.” Ju wrote, using shorthand for aggregate investor profit and loss (PnL). “Since the trend turned in Oct 2025, the bear market could last until early 2027.”

His reasoning hinges on the direction of realized profits. Put simply, holders are still sitting on paper gains they are steadily cashing in, a dynamic that historically keeps pressure on price until that selling burns itself out. The PnL index he relies on blends several onchain valuation gauges (including the market-value-to-realized-value (MVRV) ratio and net unrealized profit and loss) into a single trend line that peaked around mid-2025 and has been sliding since.

The warning extends a position Ju has pressed for much of the past year, as he first declared bitcoin’s bull cycle over in 2025, citing a widening gap between the asset’s realized capitalization and its market capitalization.

Not Everyone, Including Cryptoquant’s Own Data, Agrees

The bleak timeline is far from settled even inside Ju’s own firm, as Cryptoquant’s Bull-Bear Cycle Indicator turned green on May 12 for the first time since March 2023, a signal that has historically coincided with the start of more constructive conditions.

Other analysts are more bullish still, with research firm K33 contending bitcoin’s roughly $60,000 February low already marked the maximum drawdown of this cycle (a decline of about 52% from the record $126,272 the asset printed on Oct. 6, 2025).

The split reveals a murky mid-cycle picture, because if Ju is right, traders face another grinding stretch before realized profits reset, and the next leg higher can begin. If the greening cycle indicator and steady ETF inflows win out, the bottom may already be in.

Either way, Ju has handed the market a clear tripwire to watch wherein the moment unrealized profits start climbing while realized profits fade, the 18-month clock he describes would finally be ready to flip.

This week, the industry produced another wave of evidence that the technology itself is working as advertised.

Project Agora, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) initiative involving seven central banks and more than 40 private-sector financial institutions, successfully tested blockchain-based cross-border settlement flows. SoFi became the first national bank to issue a stablecoin on a public blockchain. Circle expanded its payout infrastructure through a partnership with Nium, while Mastercard secured a New York cryptocurrency license that broadens its stablecoin-related capabilities, and Cash App rolled out support for stablecoin payments.

But the digital dollar industry is now approaching a more difficult phase of development where success will be measured not by how quickly stablecoins move between wallets but by whether businesses and consumers can use those assets in the real economy without introducing new friction, cost or complexity.

The first challenge was proving that value can move on chain. The next challenge is figuring out how that value becomes economically useful once it moves off chain.

See also: Stablecoins Target B2B Settlement as Marketplaces Scale 

Interoperability Is More Important Than Issuance

The stablecoin market spent years focused on issuance scale. Tether and Circle competed for circulation dominance. New entrants launched chain-specific coins designed to drive ecosystem growth. But fragmentation is now becoming a structural challenge.

Stablecoins exist across multiple public blockchains, private ledgers, Layer 2 networks and emerging tokenized deposit systems. Financial institutions are simultaneously experimenting with permissioned blockchain environments while FinTechs continue building on open public chains.

But a payment system only becomes economically powerful when participants can transact across networks without introducing new operational complexity. If businesses must manage liquidity across multiple chains, maintain separate compliance processes or navigate inconsistent standards, the efficiency gains of blockchain settlement begin to erode. The future payments ecosystem is unlikely to converge around a single blockchain or a single stablecoin issuer. More likely, it will consist of multiple interoperable systems that require governance standards, messaging frameworks, compliance coordination and liquidity routing mechanisms.

“I think we go to a world built on digital network transfers of value rather than the message-based system we have today. The future of digital networks is going to be a multi-network world,” J. Christopher Giancarlo, former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chair and co-founder of the Digital Dollar Project, told PYMNTS on the latest episode of “From the Block.”

Project Agora’s significance lies partly in its recognition of this issue. The initiative explores how central bank money and commercial bank tokenization models can interact within shared programmable infrastructures rather than isolated silos.

See more: Fed Report Shows Crypto Still Has an Everyday Use Problem

Off-Ramps Are Becoming Stablecoins’ Biggest Adoption Bottleneck

The stablecoin ecosystem increasingly resembles a high-speed highway system that feeds into underdeveloped local roads. On-chain transfers may settle instantly, but businesses and consumers still operate inside local banking systems, regulatory frameworks, tax regimes, treasury processes and compliance structures that were not designed for tokenized money.

The result is that the “last mile” of stablecoin adoption often introduces many of the same frictions blockchain was supposed to eliminate. Findings in the March PYMNTS Intelligence report “Stablecoins Gain Ground: Why CFOs See More Promise There Than in Crypto” revealed that while 42% of middle-market companies have at least discussed stablecoins, only 13% have reported actual stablecoin use.

This is why partnerships like Circle’s integration with Nium matter as much as the blockchain itself. The competitive battleground is shifting away from token issuance and toward payout orchestration, banking connectivity, liquidity management and compliance automation.

SoFi’s entrance into public-blockchain stablecoins also illustrates that convergence. Traditional financial institutions are no longer merely partnering with crypto-native firms; they are directly participating in issuance and infrastructure development. Mastercard’s expanding regulatory footprint signals a similar shift.

The stablecoin networks that achieve mainstream scale are likely to be the ones that balance openness with institutional trust. Too much decentralization can create compliance uncertainty. Too much centralization can undermine the efficiency and programmability advantages that made blockchain attractive in the first place. 

Because the value proposition is not “crypto.” It is operational efficiency.