The G7 has just made hacking operations in North Korea a formal geopolitical priority. The leaders of the world’s seven largest advanced economies issued a joint statement at the Evian summit yesterday, explicitly denouncing Pyongyang’s cryptocurrency theft machine.
They accused North Korea of draining more than $6.75 billion from the crypto ecosystem since 2017. The statement frames the DPRK’s cyber operations not as a crypto security issue but as a weapons financing mechanism.
G7 CALLS FOR COORDINATED ACTION AGAINST CRYPTO THEFTS IN NORTH KOREA
G7 leaders agreed to jointly combat cryptocurrency theft and cybercrime in North Korea at the Evian summit.
The move comes after North Korea-linked Lazarus Group was blamed for the $1.5 billion Bybit hack, alongside $1.34… pic.twitter.com/CIU3hvDi0l
– Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) June 18, 2026
G7 CALLS FOR COORDINATED ACTION AGAINST CRYPTO THEFTS IN NORTH KOREAThe central tension that the G7 declaration lays bare: coordination of international measures against state-sponsored theft is simple to declare and extraordinarily difficult to execute, and the Evian communiqué is long on intentions, short on mechanisms.
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The Seven Nations Army
North Korean hackers stole $2.02 billion worth of crypto in 2025 alone, a 51% increase from 2024’s already alarming $1.34 billion in 47 incidents. The most significant event in this series was the Bybit hack in February 2025, in which $1.5 billion was taken from the exchange in what remains the largest crypto theft on record.
North Korea stole $1.5 BILLION from Bybit in less than 2 minutes
And the CEO was the last person to approve it.
Here’s the full story that no one has told properly
North Korean hackers spent months monitoring Bybit’s routine cold-to-hot wallet transfers
They didn’t touch the… pic.twitter.com/q3kyDUzqkY
— xlr8 (@xlr8files) June 16, 2026
The FBI attributed the Bybit breach to a North Korean hacking company called TraderTraitor, which issued an IC3 notice (psa250226) stating that stolen assets are quickly converted into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies before laundering begins. The laundering itself was designed to be rapid: the goal is to remove value from trackable on-chain positions before blockchain analytics companies can flag the wallets.
The pace has not slowed in 2026. According to TRM Labs, just two DPRK-related attacks, targeting Drift Protocol (a perpetual exchange based on Solana) and KelpDAO (a liquid restoration protocol built on Ethereum), resulted in losses of $577 million through April 2026. This single figure represents 76% of all global crypto hacking losses reported so far this year.
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G7 hacks against North Korea
The Evian Declaration rests on three pillars: strengthened policy coordination among G7 member countries, stricter enforcement of existing sanctions frameworks, and disruption of laundering networks that convert stolen cryptocurrencies into usable funds.
“We reiterate the need to jointly combat cryptocurrency theft and cybercrime in North Korea,” the G7 leaders said.
Japan was the internal driving force that brought this language to the agenda. Finance Minister Katayama Satsuki publicly called on G7 partners to strengthen their response to North Korea’s hacking during a press conference on May 18, 2026, presenting it as the first time the group would officially consider a collective response to state-sponsored crypto theft.
Previous G7 discussions launched a dedicated working group and new traceability rules for transactions involving anonymous wallets, including stricter compliance obligations for blockchain exchanges and analytics partnerships.
Political commentary around the June 2026 statement also highlights pushes to impose secondary sanctions on entities that facilitate laundering of Lazarus-linked actors, and to require virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to proactively block transactions from identified North Korean wallets.
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