Off the Cliff: How Token Prices Are Affected by Hacks

This research examines how token prices react to hacks and whether they ever bounce back. We're using real cases to show what actually happens in the critical hours and days after an exploit, and what signals really explain why some tokens survive while others don't.

Everyone thinks the pattern is simple: a hack happens, price goes down. But the data shows it's not that straightforward. And that's where the real patterns start to emerge. Some tokens lose most of their value and never come back. Others drops unexpectedly before rebounding as the community rallies around a recovery plan. In some unusual cases, certain tokens don’t move much at all, saved by a strong reputation or just good market timing. In short, there’s no single pattern - each token responds differently depending on the circumstances.

Key Findings

This is how token prices drop after the hacks:

Within the first hour: of tokens drop by 1% or more. For those that do, the median reaction time is just .

Long-term impact: of tokens continue falling for 3-7 days before hitting their lowest point.

So what makes a token goes down a certain path? Is it the size of the hack? The amount of money left in the treasury? The type of hack?
That's what we're here to figure out.

How We Looked at the Data

When a protocol gets hacked, we examine the behavior of its token. We expanded this approach across dozen of major incidents to build a dataset that reveals consistent patterns.

For each incident, we logged when the hack actually happened (basically the first transaction where someone drained funds or compromised the protocol) and tracked how the token's price moved at key intervals: 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 3 days and 1 week. This allows us to measure the immediate impact, the short-term trend, and any potential recovery.

What We're Investigating:

When does the market actually notice? We track the delay between the hack transaction and when the price drops by at least 1%. This gap shows us how information spreads, whether traders are watching on-chain or waiting for social media to pick it up. We examine the first hour minute by minute.
How much does the price actually drop? We measured the fall after 1 hour, 24 hours and 1 week. This shows the immediate impact and the short-term effect to see how severe the drop is and how long it stays.
When is the worst of it over? We looked for patterns in the data to see when the price typically drops the hardest (is it the first hour? the first day?) and, more importantly, when it usually finds a floor and stops going down.

By answering these questions, we hope to give you a clear, data-backed picture of what actually happens when protocols get exploited. Let's start with the very first hour.

How Fast Does the Market React?

When a protocol gets hacked, how long does it take for the price to actually move? Do traders notice right away, or does it take a while for the news to spread?

So we tracked token prices minute by minute during the first hour after each hack. Our measuring stick: how long until the price drops by at least 1%? We're using 1% as the line where you can say "okay, the market noticed something's up."

Note on data: For this minute-by-minute analysis of the first hour, we were able to obtain granular price data for out of our 48 total incidents. For some tokens historical minute-level data wasn't available. The remaining sections analyzing hourly and daily movements use the complete dataset of 48 incidents.

What We Found

There is a substantial delay between the onchain transaction of the hack and the market reaction.

Out of incidents we tracked, dropped by 1% in the first hour. The other affected tokens dropped in the span of several hours.

But here's where it gets interesting. For the tokens that did react in the first hour, the response was surprisingly quick:

tokens () hit -1% within the first 5 minutes - almost immediately
tokens () took 10 minutes to cross the line
tokens () didn't react until 30 minutes in
token () took a full 45 minutes before dropping 1%

The median reaction time? Just . So when the market is active, it usually happens fast, within the first 10-15 minutes. But again, that's a big "when." More than half the time, there's no reaction at all in that first hour.

Drilling down

KiloEx, Vestra, Shezmu, Rodeo Finance, Multichain - all these tokens dropped 1% within 5 minutes of the hack. These are the cases where everything went wrong fast and visibly - the market didn't wait around. At the same time it took 45 minutes for RDNT (Radiant Capital) to drop 1%.

The Takeaway

Even in 2025, with bots and MEV and on-chain transparency, there's still a lag between "hack happens" and "price moves." News has to get around. Someone has to notice the weird transaction. Someone has to tweet about it. Someone has to decide it's worth selling over. That chain of events takes time—sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 30, sometimes the full hour passes and nothing happens at all.

So if you're watching a hack unfold in real-time, don't assume the market has already priced it in. There's often a window, sometimes short, sometimes long, where the price is still figuring out what just happened.

But that's just the first hour. What happens after the initial shock wears off? Do prices keep falling? Do they bounce back? Let's zoom out and see what the rest of the week looks like.

Token Trajectories: The Week After

We've seen what happens in the first hour or doesn't happen. Now let's pull back and look at the full week. This is where things get messy.

The chart below shows the price trajectory of each token from one hour before the hack all the way through the first week after. Every line starts at 0% that's our baseline, the price right before things went wrong. From there, we're tracking the percent change at 1 hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 3 days, and 1 week post-hack.

We've pre-selected a few examples: KiloEx (KILO), Venus (XVS), Vow (VOW), and Seedify (SFUND),but feel free to explore any tokens you want using the dropdown. Pick a few. Compare them. See how different each story is.

Notice the differences? Some tokens drop hard right away. Others stay flat for hours before suddenly collapsing. Some bounce around wildly as new information comes out.

But we can still find patterns. In the next sections, we'll dig into the numbers: how deep do prices typically fall? When do they hit bottom? Let's break it down.

Price Drop

We've seen how fast the market reacts in the first hour, and we've looked at the different paths tokens take over a week. Now let's dig deeper into the actual numbers: how much do prices typically drop?

The First Hour

The first sixty minutes after a hack is public are pure chaos. But as you know, not all tokens are actually crash in the first hour. Across our dataset of incidents, the average token dropped by within the first hour. However, the median was closer to , suggesting that a few extreme collapses can skew the average.

This shows us there are basically two different ways the market responds. On one side, we have exploit incidents like Venus (XVS) and Stargate (STG), which dipped less than 3%. On the other, we have the outliers that experienced instant failures. Vestra (VSTR), for example, collapsed by -48.5% in under 60 minutes, and SFUND plunged -59.3%.

Here's how four tokens moved across timeframes after their hacks. Numbers show the lowest point for each token.

Why the variation? Information doesn't spread instantly. Sometimes the hack is discovered hours before the crypto community catches on. Other times, sophisticated traders know immediately-often because they're monitoring on-chain activity or have access to private alerts.

Finding the Floor

One of the most important questions for any trader or investor: when does the token actually bottom?

We analyzed the "time to the lowest point" for each token within our observation window: starting 1 hour after the hack and ending at the 1-week mark. This tight timeframe is deliberate: we're isolating the hack's direct impact, not market-wide movements or other external factors. Any price action beyond 1 weeks gets increasingly muddy with other variables.

When tokens hit their lowest point (within the 1-week window):
• of tokens hit their lowest point in the first 6 hours
• of tokens bottomed between 12-24 hours
• of tokens continued falling for 3-7 days

By the way, there's no predictable timeline. Some tokens crash hard and fast (FEG hit -90.9% in just 2 hours and hit a floor of -98% after 24 hours). Others experience a progressive loss (Sonne Finance went from -2% at 3 hours to -65% by 1 week).

The practical takeaway? The hack's direct impact unfolds over the entire 1-week period for most tokens. The that bottom in the first 6 hours are the exception, not the rule.

Important note: We purposely cap our analysis at 1 week to maintain signal clarity. Beyond this window, price movements become increasingly influenced by broader market conditions, regulatory news and general crypto volatility. Our goal is to measure the hack's impact specifically, not to track long-term recovery or decline influenced by external factors.

Final Thoughts

Even in 2025, with all the bots, MEV, and on-chain transparency, more than half of tokens at CEXes don't react right after the hack transaction lands in the blockchain. When they do, it happens fast - the median reaction time around . But the surprising part is how often there's no immediate movement at all. Information still needs to spread, someone needs to notice, someone needs to tweet about it. That chain takes time.

And here's what matters most: only of tokens find their floor in the first 6 hours. Another bottom within 24 hours. The rest continue declining beyond Day 1.