Hacks, Rug Pulls Cost BNB Chain $1.6B Since Inception: Immunefi

The blockchain remains the primary target for bad actors performing rug pulls.

BNB Chain has suffered some $1.64 billion in losses to hacks and rug pulls since the blockchain's launch seven years ago, a report by bug bounty platform Immunefi has found.

Of the total, $1.27 billion was lost to hacks, while the remaining $368 million was attributed to rug pulls, according to the report, which was shared with CoinDesk on Monday.

A rug pull is a type of fraud that involves creating a project with the sole purpose of stealing deposited funds and abandoning the project.

The report examined 228 rug pull cases, with the largest being the $40 million DeFiAI rug pull in November 2022.

In contrast, Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain and the largest smart-contract platform, has racked up losses of $3.6 billion, but just 4.4% of that is due to rug pulls, the report said.

The primary reason BNB Chain is the most common blockchain for rug pulls – a title it's held for more than a year – is developers using forked code, Immunefi said. It also claimed that the BNB Chain community is often lured in by "quick ways to make money."

"This creates a fertile environment for bad actors to launch new projects and quickly rugpull them," the report said.

However, losses dropped last year following the ZhangHeng, Plato and Hertz hard forks, which were aimed at addressing network vulnerabilities.

"This led to a decrease in the number of forks available for rugpullers to quickly launch projects and rugpull them," Immunefi said.

This year saw a further reduction, with just $38 million being lost year-to-date.

The blockchain has also suffered numerous exploits and hacks, with $200 million being lost to price manipulation of the Venus Protocol's native token in 2021, and, in 2022, DeFi protocol Qubit Finance suffered an $80 million loss after the QBridge was hacked.

BNB Chain had not replied to an email seeking comment by publication time.