According to data provided by blockchain analytics company Chainalysis, criminals moved a total of 34 million of illegal dollars through decentralized exchanges (DEXs), The Block reports.
This is quite a significant figure, however, it is much lower than the total amount of funds that passed through decentralized exchanges in 2020, which amounted to as much as $144.3B. Thus, funds moved by malicious actors only account for 0.02% of the total funds in the sector.
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However, according to Chainalysis chief scientist Jacob Illum, the trend is expected to remain upward during 2021, in part due to the fact that many of the fund movements are not identified until much later, so they are not accounted for in the year in which they were transferred. For example, the PlusToken scam was carried out in 2019, however, the scammers were only identified a year later.
In addition, Illum has also pointed to the lack of human supervision of DeFi transactions as another reason why it expects the number of criminal funds passing through decentralized exchanges to rise this year.
Another reason that could be associated with the increase in the number of illegal funds moved in the DeFi sector is the fact that a large number of darknet markets are becoming decentralized.