Crypto Companies, Defi Lost $266m To Hackers In July

In July 2024, the cryptocurrency sector suffered a series of devastating attacks, culminating in losses amounting to approximately $266 million.

Blockchain research firm PeckShield revealed in an X post on Aug. 1 that attacks against decentralized protocols in July surged to $266 million, a 51% increase compared to the $176 million reported in June.

The most significant breach last month involved WazirX, one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which lost $230 million in what appears to be a highly sophisticated attack carried out by North Korea’s hackers. The attack was a major blow to the exchange, leading to a pause in withdrawals. Subsequently, WazirX launched a program in an effort to recover the funds.

Another notable incident involved Compound Finance, a decentralized lending protocol, which experienced a governance attack by a group known as the “Golden Boys,” which pushed through a proposal that allocated 499,000 COMP tokens — valued at $24 million — to a vault under their control.

The cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol LI.FI also fell victim to a hack on July 16, resulting in losses of $9.73 million. In addition, Bittensor, a decentralized machine learning network, was one of the first protocols to suffer an exploit last month, losing $8 million on July 3 due to an attack targeting its staking mechanism. 

Meanwhile, Rho Markets, a lending protocol, experienced a $7.6 million breach. However, in an interesting twist, the exploiters sought to return the stolen funds, claiming the incident was not a hack.

On July 31, reports confirmed that the Terra blockchain protocol also witnessed a hack, leading to a $6.8 million in loss across multiple cryptocurrencies. As crypto.news reported, the attack exploited a reentrancy vulnerability that had been identified a few months ago.

Dough Finance, a liquidity protocol, lost $1.8 million in Ethereum (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC) to a flash-loan attack on July 12. Similarly, Minterest, a lending and borrowing protocol, saw a $1.4 million loss due to a manipulation of the exchange rate on one of its markets. 

Decentralized staking platform MonoSwap also reported a $1.3 million loss from an attack that allowed the perpetrators to withdraw staked liquidity from the protocol. Finally, Delta Prime, another decentralized finance platform, suffered a $1 million breach, though $900,000 of the stolen funds were later recovered.