IN 2021 year, tokens were stolen from DeFi platforms on $10.5 billions – Bits Media

Analytics company Elliptic reports, that the volume of losses due to crimes in the DeFi market has increased sevenfold this year.

Losses due to thefts and hacks on DeFi platforms
Compiled more $10.5 billion since the beginning of the year (As of 9 November), What's on 600% more, than 1.5 billion US dollars for 2020. DApps on Ethereum suffered the most losses - losses amounted to $8.6 billions. Projects on Binance Smart Chain suffered slightly less (BSC) — $2.5 billion.

Elliptic Chief Scientist Tom Robinson believes, that criminals are going there, where there is the most money and weakest protection.

“The DeFi ecosystem is an incredibly exciting and fast-changing space, where innovation in financial services occurs at the speed of light. This attracts large amounts of capital to projects, which are not always reliable or well tested. Criminals see an opportunity and take advantage of it.".

Elliptic notes, that losses are rising due to the relatively untested and immature nature of decentralized technologies. Most DeFi losses are due to coding bugs. According to experts, hackers equally often exploit errors in smart contract code and loopholes in the architecture of DeFi services.

As an example of an economic exploit, Elliptic cites an instant loan scam., during which the attacker manipulates asset prices and uses arbitrage on DeFi. The company believes, that scammers often use the “administrator key”, when access to manage a smart contract is used to steal user tokens from a dApp. The dApp creator or operator then withdraws them and disappears with the money.

Elliptic notes, what type of DApps is this, like decentralized exchanges (DEX), Decentralized mixers and bridges are used by criminals to hide their financial footprint on the blockchain and launder proceeds, obtained illegally by bypassing centralized services, which alert law enforcement agencies about questionable transactions.

Recall, that hackers recently stole $55 million from the bZx platform. During a cyber attack, private keys for managing contracts on the Polygon and Binance Smart Chain networks were compromised, and the assets were withdrawn by attackers. The creators of AnubisDAO turned out to be criminals themselves, they sold tokens on $60 million and disappeared with investors' money. Some platforms are regularly subject to cyber attacks and cannot resist hackers. Last month, the Cream Finance DeFi protocol was hacked for the third time, Hackers removed from the site $110 millions.