Share of Malicious Crypto Tokens and dApps Drops as 2024 Ends

The end of 2024 seems brighter when evaluating trends in malicious crypto tokens and decentralized apps (dApps).

According to data from blockchain security platform Blockaid, which cooperates with major crypto companies, the share of malicious tokens released this year is 59%. However, when looking at the trend over the second half of the year, this share dropped from 75% in June to 34% in December.

Polygon (MATIC) and Solana (SOL) have the largest share of malicious tokens, at 69% and 66%, respectively. Meanwhile, Avalanche (AVAX) and Arbitrum (ARB) are leading with only 5% and 9% of malicious tokens, respectively.

Additionally, Blockaid, via its platform State of the Chain, demonstrates that the number of so-called rug pull attempts on the Solana blockchain has also declined, from more than 3,800 per day in August to 2,390 on December 11. (Data for other blockchains is not provided). Rug pulls refer to a type of fraud in which developers of a crypto project disappear with all the capital they managed to raise via a token sale.

Meanwhile, when analyzing dApps, the share of malicious applications appearing per week has dropped from around 24% at the beginning of the year to 12% in mid-November. In absolute terms, the number of such risky dApps dropped from 7,436 at the beginning of 2024 to 2,636 in mid-November. However, during the year, on several occasions, there were more than 20,000 weekly malicious dApps found.

Furthermore, the blockchain security specialist said it processed 2.4 billion transactions and found that 41 million, or almost 2%, were malicious. Among the on-chain attack vectors, in 42% of cases, attackers directly stole crypto assets, while around 40% were related to thefts executed by calling various functions in smart contracts or self-executing programs.

Overall, $1.47 billion was stolen in scams or fraud.

As Blockaid concluded, "Scams are a symptom of growth, and Web3 is getting better at stopping them."