The Block: Only BNB showed significant price recovery after 2022 hack: Immunefi

A review of token prices after major hacking incidents revealed that only BNB coin showed significant recovery, up 19.2% one month after BNB Chain suffered a hack that led to a $100 million loss.

That’s according to a new report by the crypto bug bounty platform Immunefi, analyzing the impact of 63 hacks in 2022 on prices of the affected protocols' native tokens. Over $3.9 billion was lost in web3 due to hacks and scams in 2022, according to Immunefi.

Token prices plunge On average, token prices dropped 13% in the first 48 hours after a hack and 19.6% after 120 hours. Notable examples include Impermax Finance's IMX token, whose 99.6% drop was the largest both 48 and 120 hours after being exploited, and Skyward Finance's SKYWARD token, with a 97.3% price drop 48 hours after the hack and a 93.7% drop 120 hours afterward. The remaining top 10 token price drops included GERA, UVT, QANX, ANA, L2DAO, LMT, TIC, LODE, QBT and ELEPHANT.

BNB fell just 3.2% in the 48 hours following BNB Chain’s hack before recovering. One month after their respective hacks, the other tokens had not recovered and were still down 77.7% on average.

Though Ronin Network suffered the biggest exploit, leading to a $625 million loss, its RON token fell just 19.8% in the first 48 hours after the incident. Other major hacks, including Harmony’s Horizon bridge and Mango Markets ’ DeFi trading platform, also didn’t make the top 10, with their ONE and MGNO tokens down 11.5% and 42.5%, respectively.

The importance of bug bounties The amount of capital held in smart contracts makes web3 particularly attractive to malicious actors. Bug bounties incentivize white hat hackers to examine a project’s code for vulnerabilities, helping to make crypto safer by reducing the risk of exploits.

Immunefi claims to have paid out over $70 million in bounties and saved over $25 billion in user funds across protocols like Chainlink, The Graph, Synthetix and MakerDAO. The highest bounty facilitated by Immunefi was a $10 million award for a vulnerability discovered in Wormhole, a generic cross-chain messaging protocol.

Earlier this month, Immunefi identified Ethereum as white hat hackers’ blockchain of choice, followed by Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos and Tezos.

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