Crypto theft in the first half of 2023

In a report published by Beosin, almost $700 million worth of assets were stolen in the first half of 2023 from scams, fraud schemes and targeted hacks. More than a hundred of these attacks were on blockchain protocols and a total of $471.43 million was lost. Phishing attacks resulted in $108 million being unrecoverable, with fraudsters procuring $75.87 million from 110 ‘rug pulls’. As high as 80% of the attacks were focused on DeFi protocols, the largest being over $196 million which was stolen from Euler Finance. In the second quarter of 2023 alone, another publication put the amount displaced from DeFi protocols to over $208.5 million. However, no matter how bad it looks, this is actually a significant drop from the amount stolen from the wider industry in 2022 and 2021. The latter witnessed a loss of over $3.2 billion, but it did not beat the $3.7 billion loss in 2022; the worst year so far. Some of the 2022 hits were Wormhole - $325 million; Ronin Bridge - $625 million; Nomad Bri…