USENIX study finds $574.8M lost to crypto address misuse

A study presented at the USENIX Security Symposium has identified 65,340 high-risk cryptocurrency address instances across the Ethereum and BNB Chain networks. Researchers estimate that address misuse has resulted in losses exceeding $574.8 million, based on reference prices of $4,408 per ETH and $847 per BNB.

The research categorizes the risks into two primary types. Contract Account (CA) misuse involves 49,344 instances where users interact with addresses lacking deployed contract code, often due to cross-platform inconsistencies. This category accounted for losses of approximately 22,738 ETH and 8,681 BNB.

Externally Owned Account (EOA) misuse, primarily driven by the exposure of private keys, involved 15,996 high-risk addresses. A significant portion of these vulnerabilities originated from GitHub, where researchers extracted 16.3 million private keys from over 63,000 repositories. GitHub-related cases alone were linked to losses of 103,402 ETH and 8,521 BNB.