Over $3.9b worth cryptocurrency appeared to have gone missing in the year 2022, a study from Immunefi revealed.
Even though that would seem like a sizable sum of money to misplace, the survey, however, showed that it’s down 51.2% from 2021, when more than $8 billion was stolen.
According to Adrian Hetman, tech lead of Immunefi’s triaging team, cryptocurrency losses are characterized as a combination of hacking attacks and reported fraud cases. A total of 134 distinct events involving hacking accounted for $3.77 billion, or the majority of losses, in 2022. In the same time span, 34 cases resulted in a total loss of fraud of around $175 million.
Major catastrophic occurrences, such as the collapse of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem and the demise of the centralized crypto exchange FTX, occurred in both decentralized finance (DeFi) and centralized finance (CeFi). However, DeFi was generally the main target for (successful) exploits at over 80%, according to Immunefi.
From over $2 billion over 107 occurrences in 2021 to $3.18 billion across 155 incidents in 2022, DeFi losses grew by 56.2%. While this was happening, CeFi losses decreased by 87.3%, from $6 billion across nine incidents in 2021 to $768.8 million across 13 incidents in 2022.
BNB Chain, the blockchain ecosystem of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, and layer-1 blockchain Ethereum saw the most attacks in 2017, with 65 and 49 instances, respectively. In total, BNB Chain and Ethereum accounted for 63.3% of blockchain attacks.
With 12 incidents, or 6.7% of all attacks in 2022, Solana lagged behind the other two.
