A new blockchain security solution could prevent more than 99% of cryptocurrency hacks and scams, which cost the industry more than $2.3 billion in 2024, according to blockchain security firm Cyvers.
Hacks remain one of the biggest barriers to mainstream cryptocurrency adoption, with stolen digital assets surpassing the 2023 total by 40%, Cyvers said.
Total annual funds loss. Source: Cyvers
An emerging blockchain security solution may be able to prevent almost all cryptocurrency scams, by preemptively simulating and validating blockchain transactions in an offchain environment, according to Michael Pearl, vice president of GTM strategy at blockchain security company Cyvers.
“If you have the monitoring and you have the preemptive interceptor, this comprehensive solution can prevent 99.9% of all hacks, even hacks that we don’t know of, like zero-day hacks,” Pearl told Cointelegraph.
Cyvers’ Michael Pearl, interview with Cointelegraph’s Zoltan Vardai. Source: YouTube
Increasingly more wallet providers and centralized exchanges (CEXs) are interested in Cyvers’ transaction validation solution, which can be applied to small retail-size transactions and more complicated blockchain transfers, such as flash loans, Pearl said.
Crypto phishing scams, responsible for $1 billion in stolen funds across 296 incidents in 2024, remain one of the most damaging attack vectors. At least three phishing incidents exceeded $100 million in losses.
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Offchain transaction validation could have prevented $230 million WazirX hack
Cyvers’ solution could have detected the malicious smart contract that led to the $230 million WazirX hack eight days before the loss of funds, according to Pearl.
Pearl said the solution could be used to protect CEXs, which offer a single point of vulnerability to attackers:
“The reason that [CEXs] are the weak links is the fact that eventually you have one, two, or three hot wallets that are holding billions of dollars and exchanges have this conception that the funds are protected by multi-sig or multi-party computation.”
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These attacks, known as access control vulnerabilities, accounted for $1.9 billion worth of value stolen in 2024, or over 81% of the total amount lost to crypto hacks, across 67 cybersecurity incidents, according to Cyvers’ 2024 report.
Funds loss per attack vector. Source: Cyvers
Smart contract exploits ranked as the second-largest attack vector, resulting in $456 million in losses across 98 incidents, accounting for 19% of the total value stolen.
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