February 2023 Cryptocurrency Report: Stagnant Smart Contract Growth, Increased Hacks and Fraud

We are gradually increasing the number of blockchains we analyze and have reviewed new verified contracts in more than 10 blockchains in February. The number of new contracts this month exceeded 51.000, however, this number is not much different from the previous month, where only the main three blockchains were reviewed. [Source code verification tools provide guarantees that a smart contract’s source code files match the assembly code. Publishing a smart contract's source code files makes it transparent for those interested, as auditors, to assess the contract for potential attack vectors.]

After analyzing the daily data, we notice a significant decrease in the number of new contracts on the main Ethereum network and an increase in new contracts on its L2 layers as Arbitrum and Optimism.

In February, 261 projects were audited by 29 audit firms. 15 of these auditing firms did not have a single or done only one audit in February. Сompared to the previous month, there is an increase in the number of audits performed. The majority of audits are performed by a few major companies as previous month.

In February 2023 there were more attacks than in January with an approximate loss of $49,400,000 as reported CertiK in their monthly report.

The Algorand ecosystem has been feeling shockwaves after over $9.2 million USD was stolen from 17 wallets created on MyAlgo, Algorand’s leading desktop wallet.

The second major case was Platypus, a DeFi stablecoin swapping protocol on Avalanche, which was exploited for $8.5 million. The exploit occurred via a flash loan attack that took advantage of a flaw in its USP solvency check mechanism.