A new academic study finds that sending crypto to the wrong address has cost Ethereum and BNB Chain users a combined $575 million. Researchers scanned millions of on-chain addresses and flagged tens of thousands of high-risk cases, with leaked private keys behind the largest share of losses.
Sending crypto to the wrong wallet has drained $575 million from Ethereum and BNB Chain users combined, according to a new study from the USENIX Association. The research analyzed millions of addresses across both chains and identified 65,340 high-risk instances tied to contract and externally owned account misuse.
The researchers use the term "address misuse" for cases where users send funds to an address that cannot use them properly, whether that is a testnet address that doesn't work on the real chain, an old or reused smart-contract address, or an account whose private key has already been exposed.
Sending crypto to regular wallets whose private keys had already been leaked caused the biggest losses in the study, at 104,245 ETH and 9,045 BNB. Sending funds to the wrong type of contract address caused a further 22,738 ETH and 8,681 BNB in losses.
According to the USENIX paper: "have caused prevalent and high-volume loss of assets in the real world."
The report was led by researchers from Sun Yat-sen University, Peking University and Zhejiang University.
Sources: USENIX Association, The Daily Hodl
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