$3.9B Worth of Crypto Assets Were Stolen In 2022, A 51% Decline From 2021

Immunefi, a bug bounty and security services platform for Web3, assesses the volume of crypto funds lost due to hacks and scams on a quarterly and yearly basis. They recently published “Crypto Losses in 2022,” report in which they found that $3,948,856,037 (or $3.9 billion) worth of crypto were stolen (or lost) across the Web3 ecosystem in

The report found that $3.7 billion was lost to hacks in 134 different hacking incidents, and $174 million was lost to fraud in 34 different scams.

The majority of those funds were lost by four projects: Ronin Network, BNB Chain, Wormhole, and FTX.

While it may appear to be a large sum of money to get stolen and scammed, it is down 51.2% from 2021, when over $8 billion was stolen, according to the report.

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Major Loss Trends

According to the report, hacking proved to be the predominant cause of losses, accounting for 95.6% of total losses. Whereas, frauds, scams, and rug pulls accounted for 4.4% of the total losses.

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Both decentralised finance (DeFi) and centralised finance (CeFi) took hard hits in 2022. 2022 witnessed  the implosion of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem and the downfall of the centralised crypto exchange FTX.

In addition to this, DeFi was the main target for hacking, accounting for 80.5% of total losses, while CeFi accounted for 19.5%.

In 2022, DeFi losses soared by 56.2% to $3.18 billion (in 155 different incidents), from $2 billion in 2021. Meanwhile, CeFi’s losses decreased by 87.3%, from $6 billion in 2021 to $768.8 million in 2022.

The BNB Chain and Ethereum were the two most targeted blockchains in 2022, with 65 and 49 incidents, respectively. BNB Chain and Ethereum accounted for 63.3% of all blockchain attacks. Solana came in third with 12 incidents, or 6.7% of overall attacks in 2022.

Crypto “losses” are likely to be in the billions in 2023 unless all projects, blockchains, protocols, and other digital asset organisations prioritise security.

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