Crypto is a small slice of Hamas’ funding— but it’s deadly

By Lionel Laurent

As lawyers and prosecutors rake over the ashes of Sam Bankman-Fried’s fallen FTX cryptocurrency empire, another reckoning for digital currencies is underway: Governments around the world are intensifying their crackdown on sources of funding for terrorist groups — including crypto — after Hamas’s bloody attack in Israel that claimed more than 1,400 lives and led to retaliatory attacks that have killed thousands.

Crypto is a small but deadly slice of overall terrorism funding: Research by analytics firm Elliptic in 2021 estimated that wallets linked to Hamas’ military wing had received more than $7.3 million in crypto, including around $40,000 in Dogecoin, the dog-themed memecoin favored by Elon Musk. These sums aren’t much compared with the $100 million that Iran sends annually to Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups or with Qatar’s $360 million in aid for Gaza, or the approximately $300 million Hamas gets via business taxation and extortion estimated by the Washington Institute’s Matthew Levitt. But small amounts can make a difference in an era of low-cost, low-tech attacks. An estimate of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by the New York Times found they cost Al-Qaeda half a million dollars but cost the US $3.3 trillion.