Flash Loan Attacks Drained $1.2B From DeFi Between 2020 and 2024: Study
- Published
- Updated
A University of Winchester study measured $1.2 billion to $1.211 billion drained from DeFi in flash loan attacks across the period it examined. The same research scanned more than 20 billion transactions and said the attacks became more sophisticated and less predictable over that span.
Key claims & sources
What it means
What changes in practice is the way DeFi security is framed: the study does not describe a single attack type or a fixed pattern, but a set of attacks that the researchers say changed over time and were tracked across more than 20 billion transactions. What stays the same is that flash loan attacks remained a source of losses for DeFi throughout the period the study examined.
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Coverage timeline
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Where this sits in the Bitcoin series
| When | What happened | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 years ago | BTC at $115,227 high | today it sits -34.3% from there |
| 4 months ago | BTC at $58,566 low | today it sits +29.3% from there |
From what we have stored, starting 1.1 years ago.