CertiK's Friday report reveals physical coercion attacks on crypto holders and their families have already cost $101 million in early 2026, reshaping the self-custody debate.
On Friday, blockchain security firm CertiK published a report that changes the threat model for every serious crypto holder: physical coercion attacks–straight-up, real-world “wrench attacks”–have already caused $101 million in losses during just the first months of 2026. That number is not a coding bug or a smart-contract exploit. It is cash, keys, and seed phrases handed over under threat of violence against the holder or their relatives.
The simple read is that crypto crime is shifting from digital heists to physical home invasions. The better read is that a $101 million haul in a few months signals a professionalized, targeted crime wave that punishes the very behavior crypto has long celebrated: public wealth, self-custody, and on-chain bragging. When attackers start showing up at doors with a wrench and a list of wallet addresses, the old “not your keys, not your coins” mantra stops being a purity test and starts being a liability.
The standard crypto narrative has been that the main danger is a protocol vulnerability or a phishing link. CertiK’s report flips that on its head. A wrench attack doesn’t need a zero-day; it needs a name, an address, and a willingness to use force. That threat vector scales differently. While a protocol bug might be patched once, wrench attacks are distributed, low-tech, and almost impossible to trace on-chain because the victim is physically coerced into signing a legitimate transaction.
The $101 million figure matters because it shows the economics now justify this kind of crime at scale. A single high-net-worth target can be a career score for a criminal network, and crypto’s pseudonymity does not provide physical anonymity when the same addresses are linked to Twitter handles, conference badges, or NFT profile pictures. The industry has built an entire surveillance chain on the blockchain without realizing that it works just as well for kidnappers as it does for tax authorities.
For traders and asset managers, the report forces a hard re-evaluation of custody architecture. A cold wallet in a safe deposit box doesn’t help when someone holds a loved one at knifepoint until you drive to the bank. The feature that makes self-custody powerful–irreversible, unilateral control–is the same feature that makes it devastating under duress.
This is already changing the conversation among institutional players. Multi-signature setups with geographically distributed co-signers, timelocks that delay large withdrawals, and the use of purposely unsexy, low-visibility custody solutions are becoming operational demands rather than optional upgrades. Some family offices are quietly moving core holdings into regulated custodians with armed security and insurance, even if that means reintroducing counterparty risk. The trade-off is no longer theoretical when five-figure kidnappings are turning into six- and seven-figure forced transfers.
The practical implication for a trader with any material on-chain footprint is immediate: the attack surface is no longer just your seed phrase; it’s your public persona, your family’s location, and your daily routine. That changes the risk calculation not just for holders but for the liquidity profiles of assets. A trader who moves assets out of a hot wallet into a timelocked multi-sig setup suddenly has less floating supply to work with, which can quietly tighten order books on decentralized exchanges.
The CertiK report doesn’t call for panic; it calls for a security posture that matches the actual threat. For most individual traders, the near-term checklist looks something like this: scrub all social media that ties real-world identity to wallet balances; assume any on-chain address that has ever received a public transaction is known to somebody; consider moving any sum that would change your life into a setup where a single point of failure–one person or one location–cannot drain everything.
The next marker to watch will be whether specialist insurers start pricing physical-coercion riders for crypto custody, or whether exchanges begin offering bundled personal-security services for high-value accounts. Those moves would confirm that wrench attacks are becoming a structural risk, not just crime-report noise. Until then, the discipline that separates the traders who keep their gains from those who hand them over is not just a better hardware wallet–it’s the recognition that the wrench is now a genuine counterflow, and the defense is not a code audit but a cagey, low-profile operational footprint.
Drafted by the AlphaScala research model and grounded in primary market data – live prices, fundamentals, SEC filings, hedge-fund holdings, and insider activity. Each story is checked against AlphaScala publishing rules before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.