Chainalysis identified $36.7 million in losses from unverified DeFi contracts, warning that AI tools are making hidden smart contract vulnerabilities easier to exploit.
Chainalysis identified a growing attack pattern targeting unverified DeFi contracts, with hackers stealing $36.7 million across four exploits since January. Unverified smart contracts were linked to at least $36.7 million in losses across four DeFi exploits over the past six months, as attackers increasingly target protocols whose source code is not publicly available, according to Chainalysis.
The largest incident involved Truebit, which lost $26.2 million after an attacker exploited an integer overflow vulnerability in a contract that had remained unverified on Ethereum since 2021. The other incidents involved Trusted Volumes, Aperture Finance and Ekubo, according to the report. In each case, the exploited contract had not been verified on a blockchain explorer, meaning its source code was not publicly available for review.
According to Chainalysis, that limited scrutiny from security researchers and excluded the contracts from many bug bounty programs despite controlling user funds. Chainalysis attributed the trend in part to advances in decompilation tools and artificial intelligence, which can help attackers reverse-engineer smart contract bytecode and identify vulnerabilities even when source code is not publicly available.
According to the report, what once required “a skilled reverse engineer spending days on a single contract” can now be partially automated across large numbers of unverified contracts. The report challenges a longstanding assumption in DeFi that keeping smart contract code private provides an additional layer of security. According to Chainalysis, protocols relying on hidden code are increasingly depending on “obscurity as a security measure,” an approach the company said is rapidly losing effectiveness.
Chainalysis recommended source code verification, broader bug bounty coverage and real-time monitoring tools as safeguards against future exploits. The report comes amid a broader rise in crypto exploits. According to DeFiLlama,Two incidents accounted for most of the losses. KelpDAO lost $293 million and Drift Protocol suffered a $280 million exploit, together representing more than 80% of the month's stolen funds.
Although losses fell sharply in May, with CertiK reporting $68.3 million stolen from cryptocurrency exploits, the fallout from April's largest attacks continued. In June, blockchain intelligence platform Arkham reported that the attacker behind the KelpDAO exploit had laundered nearly all of the roughly
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