TRM Labs: Illegal actors seized nearly 3% of cryptocurrency liquidity in 2025.

PANews reported on January 29th that, according to The Block, a TRM Labs report shows that illicit cryptocurrency trading volume reached a record high of $158 billion in 2025, representing a year-on-year increase of nearly 145%. However, the proportion of illicit trading volume in total cryptocurrency trading volume decreased to 1.2%, lower than 1.3% in 2024 and 2.4% in 2023. The report introduced a new metric to measure the impact of illicit activity on market liquidity: illicit entities accounted for 2.7% of cryptocurrency liquidity in 2025, lower than 2.9% in 2024 and 6.0% in 2023, indicating that despite the increase in absolute size, the proportion of illicit capital in new funds is declining.

Geopolitical factors influenced the flow of illicit funds, with cryptocurrency flows related to sanctions increasing by approximately 400% year-on-year in 2025. In terms of attack types, attacks targeting operational infrastructure became the most prevalent, resulting in $2.2 billion in losses, accounting for 76% of the total losses from 45 incidents. Fraud losses decreased slightly, but "pig butchering" scams and pyramid schemes each accounted for nearly one-third of fraud losses, and criminal networks increasingly used stablecoins for fund transfers; approximately 84% of fraudulent funds flowing into stablecoins in 2025 involved stablecoins.