Crypto Projects Recover $99 Million of Stolen Funds in March, Reports PeckShield

In March, the cryptocurrency sector suffered losses amounting to $187 million due to hacks. This figure represents a 48% decrease compared to the previous month, according to PeckShield.

#PeckShieldAlert March 2024 witnessed 30+ hacks in the crypto space, resulting in ~$187.29 million in losses, with ~$98.8 million recovered.
This marks a decrease of ~48% from February 2024.#Top5 hacks:#Munchables (#Juice affected): $97 million (recovered)#CurioNetwork: $40… pic.twitter.com/u3zejt9Ygn

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) April 1, 2024

Throughout the period, experts recorded 30 incidents. The largest was an exploit of the gaming Web3 platform Munchables, based on the Ethereum Layer 2 solution Blast, with damages amounting to $97 million.

Ultimately, the founder of the NFT marketplace Blur and the L2 network, known as Packman, reported that the hacker returned the funds unconditionally.

Losses for the DeFi project Curio from a hacker attack were estimated by PeckShield at $40 million.

The perpetrator minted 1 billion CGT governance tokens. Cyvers Alerts valued the hacker’s “loot” at $16 million.

The third-largest theft involved the liquid staking platform Prisma Finance, with losses of at least $11.6 million. PeckShield specialists were among the first to report the attack.

Subsequently, the hacker initiated communication with the DeFi protocol team regarding the potential return of funds. However, he posed several questions to the developers and claimed they went unanswered.

On March 15, the Binance-supported platform NFPrompt reported a breach. According to PeckShield, the project’s losses amounted to ~$10 million.

The top five incidents of the month concluded with an exploit of the swap service of the decentralized exchange WOOFi on the Arbitrum L2 network. The hacker borrowed approximately 7.7 million WOO tokens and other assets through flash loans. After repaying the loans, his profit was approximately $8.75 million.

Over the month, affected projects managed to recover a total of $98.8 million in stolen assets.

According to Immunefi, in the first quarter, fraud and hacker attacks resulted in losses to the crypto industry reaching $336 million. All losses were linked to the DeFi sector.

For the full year 2023, Immunefi estimated industry losses at $1.8 billion. PeckShield experts cited a significantly higher figure — $2.61 billion.