In Brief:
- Defi Users and investors have lost total $12 billion in 2 years because of online Scams and bug exploitations.
- Crime across DeFi platforms have soared to 600% from 2020, with $10.5 billion being stolen since the beginning of 2021.
With the rise in decentralized finance services across the globe, malicious activity has been also getting a pace in the crypto market. As per the report released from Elliptic, Users and Investors in the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform have lost $12 billion. These stolen funds include the losses from DApps and decentralized platforms.
At present, the crypto world is growing in a surprising way as the “total value locked” (TVL) increased to nearly 500%, from $500 million in November 2019 to more than $247 billion.
Elliptic has derived the term “DeCrime” to illustrate decentralized financial crime on decentralized platforms such as DApps. The Decrime shot up to 600% from 2020, where $10.5 billion was stolen this year in comparison to last year. When only $1.5 billion funds were stolen in an entire year. It is an alarming concern for developers and designers of decentralized tools to build flawless tools to avoid bugs.
Tom Robinson, Chief Scientist at Elliptic, said: “The DeFi ecosystem is an incredibly exciting and fast-moving space, with financial services innovation happening at light speed. This is attracting large amounts of capital to projects that are not always robust or well-tested. Criminal actors have seen the opportunity to exploit this.”
In the current year, numerous decentralized platforms became a victim of cyber attacks and lost millions of funds. Luckily, some of these platforms had successfully recovered the stolen funds.
In August, the Polygon network suffered the largest hacking attack on a decentralized platform ever in history, where hackers sneaked into the network through bug exploitation and stole the $615 million fund. Later, the hacker had returned all the stolen funds.
