As a result of the market crash, the transaction volumes of permitted and illicit activities in the crypto space have fallen. Blockchain analysis company Chainalysis comes to this interim balance in a new one report on crypto crime in the first half of 2022 (up to and including July).
“Overall, criminal activity appears to be more resilient in the face of falling prices: illicit volumes are down just 15 percent year-on-year, while legal volumes are down 36 percent,” the report said.
However, these are only aggregated values that make one or the other interesting outlier disappear in the collective. Hence, below are the numbers for different types of illegal activities.
Crypto scams and dark web activity are shrinking
According to the report, the turnover from scams in the crypto sector is currently USD 1.6 billion. By comparison, at the end of July last year, fraudulent earnings were 65 percent lower.
Chainalysis also finds a connection to the Bitcoin price: “Since January 2022, fraud revenues have fallen more or less in line with the Bitcoin price.”
According to the report, Darknet trading places are also recording a big minus: Sales are said to have shrunk by almost half (43 percent) compared to the same period last year.
It’s important to note that earlier this year, marketplaces on the dark side of the web seemed to have a promising year ahead of them – until April started to paint a slightly different picture.
Chainalysis suspects a connection to the simultaneous shutdown of the world’s largest Darknet marketplace Hydra – BTC-ECHO reported.
“Interestingly, while overall darknet market revenue fell after the Hydra shutdown, the rest of the markets saw a significant increase in the number of individual transfers received,” the report states. It is therefore assumed that traders could redistribute their trades to other Darknet platforms.
Crypto hacks in their heyday
Although, according to Chainalysis, illegal activities with Bitcoin and Co. have decreased overall, any counter-movements are smoothed out on average.
Such is the case for hacks, according to the report: since the beginning of the year, about $1.9 billion has reportedly been raked in by this type of attack. In the same period last year it was about 1.2 billion US dollars.
It should be noted: The time of observation for the current Chanalysis report extended from the beginning of the year up to and including July 2022. This means that the significant hacker attacks on Solana and the Nomad Bridge were not taken into account in this data.
We have explained to you here how secure such token bridges really are and why they often become a target for hackers.
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