Hackers targeting the crypto industry stole $1.97 billion across 175 projects in the first half of 2022, according to Atlas VPN.
The Ethereum ecosystem suffered the most — losses of more than $1 billion across 32 incidents. The largest was the Ronin sidechain hack, used in NFT game Axie Infinity. The attackers withdrew from the project’s cross-chain bridge assets worth approximately $625 million.
The Solana ecosystem and related projects ranked second, with hackers stealing $383.9 million across five attacks. In this case, a large share of the losses came from the cross-chain protocol Wormhole — over $319 million.
The BNB Chain ecosystem (formerly Binance Smart Chain) posted losses of $141.4 million. In the half-year, hackers carried out the greatest number of attacks on its projects — 47.
In January, attackers withdrew from the DeFi platform Qubit Finance on BNB Chain digital assets worth about $80 million.
In the half-year, NFT-sector projects yielded attackers $84.6 million across 45 incidents, and Fantom ecosystem losses from eight attacks totalled $54.8 million.
Analysts noted that over the past two years, the number of attacks on crypto projects has risen almost linearly with each quarter. In the first half of 2022, the number of such incidents nearly doubled the figure for the same period a year earlier.
The number of cybercrimes increased by 22% from the first quarter to the second. The highest number of attacks occurred in May — 37 hacks and frauds.
On July 1, became the victim of a hacker attack the ecosystem’s largest L2 solution, Optimism NFT marketplace Quixotic.
On July 3, attackers withdrew from the liquidity pools of the Solana-based DeFi protocol Crema Finance digital assets worth about $6 million.
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