Forbes released a report on December 28th, which revealed that over $3 billion was directly taken in 125 hacks, in addition to the billions of dollars lost in 2022 due to the failure of the TerraLUNA3 stablecoin and the failures of other crypto financial enterprises like FTX Trading.
The top five steals in 2022 totaled $1.48 billion and used decentralized finance (DeFi), accounting for 49% of the total. Additionally, despite praise for transparency, these protocols lost 75% of TVL this year.
According to data from the decentralized financial tracker DeFi Llama, the total wealth locked in DeFi protocols decreased from 166.58 billion at the start of the year to 39 billion by the middle of December.
The report claimed that the major target this year, stealing approximately $2 billion from decentralized financial protocols, was blockchain bridges, which accounted for 70% of all losses.
Sam Williams, the CEO of blockchain security company Arweave, outlines the dangers that come with so-called blockchain bridges and states that “in retrospect, there were a lot of cutting corners for expediency.”
Sam added that throughout several cross-chain attacks this year, hackers were able to use several private keys owned by single parties to access the bridges’ protocols. “As an industry, we did not do well enough in calling out poor quality designs across the board.”
Biggest Crypto Heists 2022
According to the report, Ronin Network, a blockchain that powers the NFT-based video game Axie Infinity, became a victim of the biggest heist of the year. In which they lost more than $500 million worth of ether and USD currency.
A bridge protocol known as Wormhole Network had a vulnerability on February 2nd that was exploited by an unidentified hacker, who, at the time of the heist taken around $325 million.
In addition, from Beanstalk Farms, an Ethereum-based stablecoin project, an attacker was able to steal approximately $150 million in crypto in April. Moreover, in a cyberattack on September 20th, the London-based crypto market maker, Wintermute, suffered a loss of $160 million.
In October, Mango Markets, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange based on Solana, suffered a $112 million loss and BNB Smart Chain was the victim of a $110 million exploit.
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