The FBI has urged people to be cautious and heavily research a DeFi – decentralized finance – provider before putting your money into it, after more than a billion dollars was stolen from these providers in three months.
In an alert this week, quoting numbers from blockchain research firm Chainalysis, the Feds said $1.3 billion in cryptocurrencies were siphoned in total between January and March 2022 alone, and 97 percent of that was lifted from DeFi outfits. In May, Chainalysis upped that figure to $1.68 billion for the first four months of the year.
The FBI wants folks to realize the risks, get professional financial advice if in doubt, and do their homework on the security and general practices of DeFi providers. And by DeFi provider, we all mean exchanges, marketplaces, and similar sites where you can buy, sell, exchange, and loan cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.
The bureau’s warning comes after a round of cyber-robberies against these sorts of platforms, including a $100 million hit on Harmony (thought to been carried out by North Korea), an estimated $200 million theft from BitMart and a $130 million heist from Cream Finance.
According to Chainalysis, North Koreans have had their biggest year yet for cryptocurrency theft, with a haul of at least $840 million so far in 2022.
“The data goes to show that shoring up DeFi protocols’ defenses against hackers isn’t just a matter of building trust with users so that DeFi can continue to grow,” Chainalysis argued. “It’s also a matter of international security given that cryptocurrency stolen by North Korean hacking groups is used to support the country’s development of weapons of mass…
