Hackers stole billions of dollars in cryptocurrency for yet another year. However, the trend has shifted downward for the first time since 2020, according to crypto security companies.
According to De.FI, the web3 security business that manages the Rekt leaderboard, hackers stole about $2 billion in cryptocurrency this year over hundreds of hacks and robberies. The site lists the worst-ever crypto breaches, ranging from the breach of the Ronin network in 2022, in which hackers took more than $600 million in cryptocurrency in the greatest event in history, to the heist against Mixin Network this year, which netted the criminals roughly $200 million.
“This amount, though dispersed across various incidents, underscores the persistent vulnerabilities and challenges within the DeFi ecosystem,” DeFi noted in a study shared with Eltrys. “2023 stood as a testament to both the ongoing vulnerabilities and the strides made in addressing them, even as interest in the space was relatively muted by the ongoing bear market in the first half of the year.” 
In early December, TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence startup, also provided an estimate of the total amount of cryptocurrency that hackers have stolen this year. According to the firm, the amount was over $1.7 billion as of mid-December.
The heist against Euler Finance, in which hackers took about $200 million, was among the worst crypto thefts of the year, as were big hacks against Multichain ($126 million), BonqDAO ($120 million), Poloniex ($114 million), and Atomic Wallet ($100 million), among hundreds of others.
Last year, blockchain monitoring company Chainalysis revealed that fraudsters had stolen an all-time high of almost $3.8 billion in cryptocurrency. North Korean government hackers known as the Lazarus Group, one of the most successful gangs of crypto criminals, stole $1.7 billion as part of an endeavor to support the regime’s sanctioned nuclear weapons development.
“It isn’t a stretch to say that cryptocurrency hacking is a sizable chunk of the nation’s economy,” Chainalysis said in research last year.
According to Chainalysis, hackers stole $3.3 billion in 2021 from the previous year.
What will happen in 2024 is difficult to foresee. However, given the lack of security employed by many crypto and web3 projects, as stated earlier this year at Eltrys Disrupt, and the sheer amount of monetary worth they carry, we should anticipate hackers continuing to attack the developing sector.
