Clamping down on crypto scams and misuse will be key to gaining mainstream legitimacy.
By 2024, Gartner predicts that successful cryptocurrency thefts and ransomware payments will actually decrease by 30% due to criminals’ inability to move and spend funds off of blockchain networks. This is incredible good news because cryptocurrency-related crimes, primarily scams and stolen funds, reached an all-time high of $14 billion in 2021 and his is nearly double as much as last year ($7.8 billion), according to research from Chainalysis. Among the more recent types of scams are so-called ‘rug pulls’ in which developers build crypto projects that appear legitimate only to then abscond with investors’ money, never to be seen again. Meanwhile, cybercriminals in North Korea extracted close to $400 million of digital assets in 2021 after it issued at least seven attacks on crypto platforms, targeting investment firms and centralized exchanges.
But with the dramatic growth of cryptocurrency use in 2021, there is encouraging news: illicit activity is at its all-time low. Only 0.15% of cryptocurrency transaction volume in 2021 involved illicit addresses, down from 0.62% in 2020, Chainalysis says.
Sven Franssen