When people outside the industry talk about crypto risk, they usually mean price swings. For anyone who actually uses decentralized finance, that is only the surface. The deeper risk is structural: smart contracts break, bridges get drained, governance goes sideways, and centralized platforms fail in ways that leave users with no realistic path to recovery.
Those structural failures are not rare edge cases. Chainalysis estimates that hackers stole about 2.2 billion dollars in crypto in 2024 alone, a 21 percent increase over the previous year, and notes that this was the fourth year in a row that hacking losses stayed above 1 billion dollars. A growing share of that comes from complex DeFi protocols and cross chain infrastructure rather than simple wallet mistakes.
