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I hope you are all well and are having an excellent day welcome to CryptoGod-1’s blog on all things crypto. While we are still early days into the year, a new report has been released detailing the levels and amounts of hacks in regions around the world, with some very interesting visual data to display the information. Below I will look in detail at the hacks and how the report has shown their impact on different regions.
Rug Pulls in 2023...So Far
Although we are only approaching the end of March, 2023 has so far seen hackers make away with a total of $119 million in crypto from 19 seperate breaches, according to the analysis done by Crystal Blockchain. They recently released a which shows data dating back from the Mt. Gox hack in 2011 all the way up until the 18th of February 2023. The report is laid out in a very user friendly manner, allowing anybody to simply glance at the data and get an idea of when the worst years have been, along with the latest hacks, as shown in the image from the report below.
The data is interactive, meaning a user can simply rotate the globe and select a specific country to see the information relating to their hacks, or search by a specific year. As of the data available, the largest hack to date in 2023 was a part of Bong DAO, a decentralized lending platform, which saw the smart contract compromised and manipulated to change the value of the tokens, and net the hackers a tasty $88 million of crypto.
After that, the next largest De-Fi related attack involved the Platypus protocol, which issued the stable-coin USP. Back in February a flash loan attack led to the stable-coin de-pegging and saw the protocol lose around $9 million in users funds. Although it was a large loss, the protocol was in a position to refund the users, at least partially, and they used investigators to trace and track the hackers. Their wallets were traced to the BINANCE exchange and from there they were discovered to be two individuals from France and duly arrested.
Increase in Hacks and Scams
The majority of the attacks have been focused around targeting vulnerabilities, such as the code and design of decentralized exchanges and protocols. This came about along with the popularity in DeFi throughout 2021, and on average the decentralized protocols were hacked thirteen times more than the centralized ones in 2022. The largest of these attacks was on the Ronin cross-chain bridge back in March 2022, where a total of $625 million was reported as being taken in various tokens.
The year 2022 saw $4.17 billion stolen across a total of 199 individual incidents, which may increase further as more information from last year comes to light regarding the criminal activities.
A worrying trend for those who enjoy NFT's has been the ever increasing amount of rug pulls within the space. One of the most common types is when the founders of a project disappear with user's funds and are never to be seen again, often because they initiated the project under anonymous or pseudonym names. Throughout 2022, a total of 48 of these rug pulls occurred (as of the latest data) with a staggering 41 of them taking place in the second half of the calendar year. This would be in line with the phenomenal growth the space witnessed throughout 2021 and 2022, with the market cap for NFTs alone growing by 1,785% in 2021. While the popularity has since diminished, users are still not fully protected from NFT scams and attacks in 2023. One particular collector, Kevin Rose, saw around $1 million in NFTs stolen from his wallet in a phishing attack when his wallet was compromised back in late January.
Below is an executive summary and key findings from the report.
All in all since the data was tracked from back in 2011 a staggering $16.7 Billion worth of cryptocurrencies have been taken in a variety of hack and rug-pulls. While the U.S. is often the main target, largely due to the popularity of crypto and NFTs within the nation, it is actually China where the most value has been lost to scams. In 2019 alone the infamous PlusToken Ponzi saw around $2.25 Billion while another $1.1 Billion was lost to the WaToken Scam in 2020, according to the data.
So there we have it. Possibly not surprising news to most, especially that NFTs have become a huge targets for scams and that crypto in general has a serious issue with bad actors. However, it is very interesting and eye opening to see all the information laid out in an interactive report like this and well worth the read for anybody who is interested.
You can find the report by Crystal Blockchain on their website here: https://crystalblockchain.com/security-breaches-and-fraud-involving-crypto/
Have a great day.
CryptoGod-1.
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