Hackers focused on the cryptocurrency market have stolen around $2 billion this year by attacking cross-chain bridges 13 times, Chainalysis reports. In a new blog post, the New York-based firm notes that this sum accounts for 69% of total funds stolen since the beginning of 2022.
However, the analysts warn that the amount is not final as more attacks might be in sight due to the lack of the gold standard for security on the decentralized finance (DeFi) market. The firm points out many cross-chain bridges are still vulnerable to attacks as their storage methods are far from good:
"Additionally, effective bridge design is still an unresolved technical challenge, with many new models being developed and tested."
Chainalysis forecasts new designs for storing tokens in cross-chain bridges present novel attack vectors that "may be exploited by bad actors as best practices are refined over time."
As iHodl earlier reported, a group of hackers attacked the cross-chain protocol called Nomad and stole about $190 million in cryptocurrencies. Researchers at SlowMist tracked the stolen tokens that ended up sitting on three cryptocurrency addresses. As of press time, the bad actors returned only $9 million so far.
