31
Mar, 2025
North Korean crypto attacks rising in sophistication, actors — Paradigm
Altcoin News, Bitcoin News, Crypto Analytics, Crypto Industries & Currency Updates
North Korean cyberwarfare attacks on the cryptocurrency industry are growing in sophistication and in the number of groups involved in such criminal activity, crypto firm Paradigm warns in report titled “Demystifying the North Korean Threat.”
North Korea-originated cyberattacks range from assaults on exchanges and social engineering attempts to phishing attacks and complex supply chain hijacks, the report says. In some cases, the attacks take a year to play out, with North Korean operatives biding their time.
The United Nations estimates that between 2017 and 2023, North Korean hackers have netted the country $3 billion. The total haul has skyrocketed in 2024 and this year, with successful attacks against crypto exchanges WazirX and Bybit, which together netted attackers around $1.7 billion.
Paradigm writes that the North Korean organizations orchestrating these attacks number at least five: Lazarus Group, Spinout, AppleJeus, Dangerous Password, and TraitorTrader. There is also a coalition of North Korean operatives who pose as IT workers, infiltrating tech companies around the world.
Related: Typosquatting in crypto, explained: How hackers exploit small mistakes
High-profile attacks and predictable laundering methods
Lazarus Group, the most well-known North Korean hacking team, is given credit for some of the most high-profile cyberattacks since 2016. According to Paradigm, the group hacked Sony and the Bank of Bangladesh in 2016 and helped orchestrate the WannaCry 2.0 ransomware attack in 2017.
It has also taken aim at the cryptocurrency industry, sometimes to great effect. In 2017, the group hit two crypto exchanges — Youbit and Bithumb. In 2022, Lazarus Group exploited the Ronin Bridge, resulting in hundreds of millions in lost assets. And in 2025, it infamously stole $1.5 billion from Bybit, sending shock throughout the crypto community. The group may be behind some Solana memecoin scams.
As Chainalysis and other organizations have explained, Lazarus Group also has predictable money laundering methods after securing a haul. It breaks up the stolen amount into smaller and smaller pieces, sending them to countless other wallets. It then swaps the more illiquid coins for those with higher liquidity and converts much of it to Bitcoin (BTC). After that, the group may sit on the stolen money for a long period of time until the attention from law enforcement dies down.
The FBI has so far identified three alleged members of the Lazarus Group, accusing them of cybercrimes. In February 2021, the US Justice Department indicted two of those members for involvement in global cybercrimes.
Magazine: Lazarus Group’s favorite exploit revealed — Crypto hacks analysis
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31
Mar, 2025
Cap Labs Reveals Type III Stablecoins, Promising Smarter Yield Generation With No Human Oversight
Altcoin News, Bitcoin News, Crypto Industries & Currency Updates
The Stanford Blockchain Club published a paper on March 28 introducing “Type III Stablecoins,” a new category of yield-bearing stablecoins governed by autonomous smart contracts, developed by Cap Labs’ Benjamin and Jae. Yield Without Compromise? Type III Stablecoins Propose a Trustless Path Forward The paper published in the Stanford Blockchain Review outlines a paradigm shift […] …
31
Mar, 2025
Hyperliquid DEX trading volumes cut into CEX market share: Data
Altcoin News, Bitcoin News, Crypto Analytics, Crypto Industries & Currency Updates
Hyperliquid is one of the current bull market’s standout DeFi success stories. With daily trading volumes having reached $4 billion, the exchange has become the largest decentralized (DEX) derivatives platform, commanding nearly 60% of the market.
Hyperliquid still lags far behind Binance Futures’ $50 billion daily average volume, but the trend suggests that it has started to encroach on centralized exchange (CEX) territory.
What’s behind Hyperliquid’s parabolic rise?
Launched in 2023, Hyperliquid gained popularity in April 2024 after launching spot trading. This, combined with its aggressive listing strategy and easy-to-use onchain user interface, helped to lure in a wave of new users.
The platform’s real explosion, however, came in November 2024, following the launch of its HYPE (HYPE) token. Hyperliquid’s trading volume skyrocketed, and it now boasts over 400,000 users and more than 50 billion trades processed, according to data from Dune.
Hyperliquid cumulative trades and users. Source: Dune
While Hyperliquid started as a high-performance perpetual futures and spot DEX, its ambitions have since expanded. With the launch of HyperEVM on Feb. 18, the project has become a general-purpose layer-1 chain capable of supporting third-party DeFi apps built on top of its infrastructure.
As one of Hyperliquid’s founders, Jeff Yan, put it,
“Most L1s build infrastructure and hope that others will come build the killer apps. Hyperliquid takes the opposite approach: polish a native application and then grow into general-purpose infrastructure.”
If this approach works, the liquidity driven by Hyperliquid’s core DEX could naturally feed into the broader ecosystem and vice versa, creating a flywheel effect.
Related: Hyperliquid flips Solana in fees, but is the ‘HYPE’ justified?
Will Hyperliquid become a sustainable CEX alternative?
According to CoinGecko, Hyperliquid now ranks 14th among derivatives exchanges by open interest, sitting at $3.1 billion. That’s still behind Binance’s $22 billion but ahead of older names like Deribit or derivatives divisions of Crypto.com, BitMEX, or KuCoin. It’s the first time a DEX is competing so closely with established CEXs.
Furthermore, as Hyperliquid deepens its focus on specialized trading pairs, it continues to chip away at the market share of major exchanges. The DEX accepts not only Arbitrum USDC as collateral but also native BTC. This makes it one of the few decentralized platforms that handle BTC wrapping and unwrapping natively, giving users the option to use BTC for Web3-wallet-based trading.
X user Skewga.hl noted that Hyperliquid’s BTC perpetual futures volume share recently hit an all-time high, reaching almost 50% of Bybit’s and 21% of Binance’s. Skewga.hl wrote,
“No DEX has ever come this close to matching Tier 1 CEX volume.”
Daily volume ratios, Hyperliquid vs Other exchanges (BTC perp). Source: Skewga.hl
Since 2024, perpetual swaps have seen a revival as a trading tool. During the 2021–2022 bull market, daily perps volume averaged around $5 billion. In early 2025, that number often exceeded $15 billion, with Hyperliquid accounting for nearly two-thirds of it.
Data from DefiLlama illustrates the shift: while dYdX (green) dominated in 2023–2024, the landscape diversified significantly in 2024—and by 2025, Hyperliquid (pink) had taken the lead.
Perps volume breakdown. Source: DefiLlama
Despite the recent JELLY token scandal, which involved the exchange halting trading and delisting a low-market-cap token that a whale had exploited, Hyperliquid remains a popular exchange among DeFi and DEX traders. It has yet to capture institutional investor flows or scale to the level of top-tier CEXs. However, if its layer 1 ecosystem gains traction with developers, Hyperliquid could evolve into more than just a leading DEX.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
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