A report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis says that close to 4% of whales in the crypto space are criminals.
What Happened: Chainalysis identified 4,048 criminal whales that hold over $25 billion worth of cryptocurrency.
“An interesting pattern emerges when we break down all criminal whales by the share of their total funds that have illicit origins: Most criminal whales received either a relatively small or extremely large share of their total balance from illicit addresses,” stated Chainalysis.
Stolen balances made up the majority of overall criminal balances, however, darknet markets were the biggest source of illicit funds sent to criminal whales.
What Else: The report also found that revenue from crypto scams rose 82% in 2021 to $7.8 billion. A large portion of this amount was caused by DeFi rug pull scams, which have become a well-known hazard in the crypto space.
Chainalysis said that part of the reason that DeFi rug pulls are so common is the hype around the DeFi space. The firm attributed this growth to the “incredible returns on decentralized tokens” like Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB) that had drawn in many investors to speculate on DeFi tokens.
“At the same time, it’s very easy for those with the right technical skills to create new DeFi tokens and get them listed on exchanges, even without a code audit,” according to the report.
Bitcoin Price Action: At press time, the leading crypto asset Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) was trading at $41,152, down 6.53% in the last 24 hours.
Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on Unsplash.
