$1.22 Billion Worth of Crypto Has Been Stolen
Did you know that almost half of all first-time crypto investments happened in 2021? This just goes to show how popular digital currency is getting. So popular that people will do anything to get their hands on it, even if that puts them behind bars for 40,000 years.
But we’ll get to that later…
About 30,000 people across 20 countries were surveyed between November 2021 and February 2022. What they found out was that 2021 was a big year for crypto, in terms of investors. Inflation really drove these transactions more than anything, strangely enough.
Even stranger is that Brazil and Indonesia — NOT the U.S. — lead the world in crypto adoption. About 41% of people surveyed in those countries owned. The U.S. and U.K. sits at about 20%.
79% of people who reported owning crypto last year said they chose to purchase the digital assets for their long-term investment potential.
Only 16% of respondents in the United States and 15% in Europe agreed that cryptocurrencies hedge against inflation, compared with 64% in Indonesia and India, for example.
The Indian rupee has declined 17.5% against the dollar in the last five years, while the Indonesian rupiah depreciated 50% against the dollar between 2011 and 2020.
Only 17% of Europeans reported that they owned digital assets in 2021, and only 7% of those who do not currently own crypto said they intended to buy digital assets at some point.
While the most popular cryptocurrency, bitcoin, hit an all-time high of more than $68,000 in November, helping to push the value of the cryptocurrency market to $3 trillion, according to CoinGecko, it has traded in the narrow range of $34,000-$44,000 for most of 2022 so far.
With this huge bump in popularity, should crypto owners be worried that their assets will be stolen? Well, so far, hackers have grabbed about $1.22 billion already.
That’s nearly eight times more than the $154 million lost in the first quarter of 2021, according to crypto security firm Immunefi. Ninety-nine percent of those losses were from software exploits, the report found, specifically the hacks against Wormhole and Ronin.