DeFi’s growth this year has been staggering. Towards the start of the year, DeFi’s total value locked (TVL) had managed to hit the $1 billion mark. However, over the next 9 months, DeFi’s TVL jumped to $13.5 billion.
Interestingly, the past month saw the DeFi hype slightly die down, and during the course of October, many DeFi tokens fell on the charts, only to rise again as November kicked in with renewed bullish sentiment for tokens like YFI and COMP.
Source: CipherTrace
However, while DeFi’s story seems to be progressing from strength to strength in 2020, a darker side of the ecosystem seems to be growing simultaneously. According to a recent report[1] published by CipherTrace[2], this boom has also attracted criminal hackers to DeFi, resulting in the most DeFi[3] hacks in a year to date. The report highlighted,
“In the first six months of 2020, 45% of all thefts were DeFi hacks, equating to about $51.5M—40% of hacked volume for that time period. So far, in the second half of 2020, DeFi has dominated 50% of all thefts, equally roughly $47.7M—14% of hacked volume for this time period.”
As DeFi grew and rose by a whopping 700 percent in terms of TVL from the beginning of 2020, a troubling underbelly formed. In fact, the aforementioned finding led to CipherTrace’s data concluding that DeFi hacks made up 21% of 2020’s hack and theft volume.
Source: TradingView[4]
While many would like to believe that the DeFi hype has come to a conclusion, the decentralized finance ecosystem continues to be one of the hot properties of the digital asset market. While September and October painted a fairly different picture for many projects with tokens like YFI, UNI, COMP, UMA, etc. falling by
