The decentralized finance sector is growing at a breakneck pace. Three years ago, the total value locked in DeFi was a mere $800 million. By February 2021, the figure had grown to $40 billion; in April 2021, it attained a milestone of $80 billion; and now it stands at above $140 billion. Such rapid growth in a new market could not but attract the attention of all manner of hackers and fraudsters.
According to a report by crypto research company, since 2019, the DeFi sector has lost about $284.9 million to hacks and other exploit attacks. Hacks of blockchain ecosystems are an ideal means of enrichment from the point of view of hackers. Because such systems are anonymous, they have money to lose, and any hack can be tested and tuned without the victim’s knowledge. In the first four months of 2021, losses amounted to $240 million. And these are just the publicly known cases. We estimate real losses to be in billions of dollars.