ImmuneFi incurred loss of a total of $10B in DeFi hacks and exploits in 2021
ImmuneFi, the DeFi security platform and bug bounty service have published an official report on January 6, calculating the total volume of losses in the cryptocurrency markets that occurred in the year 2021.
According to the official report, the company incurred losses resulting from scams, hacks, and various other malicious activities, that amounted to a sum exceeding $10.2 billion dollars over the last one year.
ImmuneFi, who is responsible for the protection of more than $100 billion worth of assets for several well-established DeFi protocols, such as Synthetix, SushiSwap, Chainlink and PancakeSwap, among many others, has been regularly facilitating seven-figure pay-outs to whitehat hackers as well as other good-willed entities for prevention of protocol compromises.
According to the report, there had been 120 instances of crypto exploits and major fraudulent rug-pulls in 2021. Among them, the highest-valued hack was the Poly Network costing $613 million, seconded by Venus and BitMart worth $200 million and $150 million, respectively.
Other entries to the list are Alpha Finance and Cream Finance, who had been both hacked for $37.5 million, then Yearn.finance’s at $11 million, Furucombo’s of $14 million evil contract exploit, and the infamous Alchemix reverse rug where the platform’s users had claimed a welcome fortune due of $6.5 million after an issue of withdrawal had risen with one of the platform’s smart contracts synthetic assets called alETH.
Overall, the year 2021 had seen a stark rise in both the frequency and volume of security breaches, when compared to 2020. In 2020, there were altogether 123 incidences totalling $4.38 billion of exploits, which is a 137 per cent increase.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, CEO and Founder of Immunefi, Mitchell Amador, has spoken of his optimism for the future of on-chain security, despite 2021 being the year he describes as a “year of dramatic losses” for the crypto industry.
Amador said that despite the appearance of entirely new vulnerabilities in the onchain economy, the community has been adapting rapidly. At Immunefi alone, they have “saved double the amount lost to exploitation” in 2021 and security best practices had been circulating throughout the crypto community alongside such exploits.
Amador further cited ImmuneFi’s role in facilitating Polygon’s (MATIC) recent $3.47 million pay-outs made to two whitehat hackers for their praiseworthy role in averting what is being described as a “critical” vulnerability in the network’s proof-of-stake Genesis contract, that had been responsible in placing almost all of the MATIC token supply of $10 billion at risk.
Last year in September, ImmuneFi had even sponsored “the largest bounty in the history of DeFi” to a renowned white hat programmer Alexander Schlindwein for his instrumental role in averting a potential $10-million bug crisis in the automated market maker, or AMM, protocol Belt Finance.
Schlindwein had received a compensation of $1.05 million in total, wherein a sum of $1 million from it had been granted by Belt Finance with ImmuneFi acting as the middleman, whereas the remaining $50,000 had been offered by Binance Smart Chain’s Priority One program.
In October 2021, ImmuneFi had announced a $5.5 million capital raise from a group of institutional investors that included Blueprint Forest and Electric Capital. This was done with the intention of expansion of its security services across the DeFi industry in a concerted effort for lowering the prevalence as well as the financial impact of benevolent security exploits in the crypto space.
