New Study Uncovers $575,000,000 in Losses From Ethereum and BNB Chain Address Misuse

Researchers say ordinary mistakes involving testnet addresses, reused contracts and exposed private keys have triggered hundreds of millions in losses on Ethereum and BNB Chain.

The USENIX Association says on-chain analysis of millions of addresses identified 65,340 high-risk instances tied to contract and externally owned account misuse.

The term “address misuse” essentially refers to people accidentally sending their crypto to the wrong wallet, whether it’s a test-network address that doesn’t work on the real chain, an old or reused smart-contract address or an account whose private key was already exposed.

“Despite their importance, addresses also constitute a potential vector for security risks. Due to negligence, misoperation, or lack of knowledge, users may interact with unsafe or unintended addresses, even directly transferring tokens to these addresses.

Such incorrect address interactions, collectively referred to as Address Misuses in this paper, have caused prevalent and high-volume loss of assets in the real world.”

Sending crypto to the wrong type of contract address caused losses of 22,738 ETH and 8,681 BNB, while sending it to regular wallets whose private keys had already been leaked caused much larger losses of 104,245 ETH and 9,045 BNB.

The report was led by researchers from Sun Yat-sen University, Peking University and Zhejiang University.

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