The second quarter of 2022 was one for the books amid a tumultuous period of what I like to call market madness, and the evidence keeps stacking up for the crypto markets. Q2 was full of massive crypto “losses” across the web3 ecosystem, some 97% of which were the result of hacks, according to a new report.
Immunefi’s Crypto Losses in Q2 2022 report identified $670,698,280 worth of losses in Q2, up 52% from $440,021,559 in the same period for 2021.
Most of those losses were contained to just four hacks: Decentralized stablecoin protocol Beanstalk lost $182 million; layer-1 blockchain bridging protocol Harmony Horizon lost $100 million; and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols Mirror and TribeDAO lost $90 million and $80.34 million, respectively.
“With every disruptive technology, there is a process of iteration, and building out a bigger and better DeFi platform is based currently more on speed than security.” Flux co-founder Daniel Keller
While $670 million is a whopping number, total crypto losses declined 45.5% from about $1.23 billion in the first quarter of 2022, according to a previous report by Immunefi.
However, it’s worth noting that the spike in the first quarter is a bit lopsided due to the largest DeFi hack to date – a sizable $625 million hack on the Ronin Network in March. Without that hack, the first-quarter losses would have been more in line with the second quarter.
But as we enter the third quarter of the year, some market players think hacks are a trend that will continue regardless of current market conditions.