Decentralized finance has gained significance in recent years, as have concerns about the financial system’s stability. Exchange mechanisms, such as those utilized on cryptocurrency platforms, enhance volatility, and transmit risk contagion to other financial actors globally, which may increase financial calamity. We propose a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model with a time delay to examine the mechanism of risk contagion in the cryptocurrency markets during the last decade. The governance token prices of the main cryptocurrency exchange platforms, as well as their spillover effects, crash risks and indicators of people’s attention, are assessed, and the obtained parameters are used in the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model to replicate the dynamics of risk contagion in the examined crypto markets. Findings suggest high interconnection among crypto markets in short-run and the fear spread among people play an important contribution to financial risks. Under the new decentralized finance paradigm, predictive modeling of the temporal distribution of risk among cryptocurrencies may provide useful insights for policy and financial system stability, as well as for contagion risk.