The crypto industry lost about $110 million to hacks in July, highlighting persistent security risks across digital assets. However, stronger bug bounty activity helped researchers identify hundreds of threats before attackers could exploit them.
Immunefi reported that confirmed and paid bug bounty reports rose 18% during July. Researchers earned $2.32 million for uncovering verified vulnerabilities during the month.
Bug Bounties Expose More Critical Flaws
Additionally, Immunefi reviewed 1,178 top-tier audits and found a median of zero critical or high-severity bugs. However, its 58 audit competitions uncovered significantly more serious vulnerabilities.
Those competitions found an average of 6.2 serious bugs per engagement. By comparison, private top-tier audits identified 1.5 serious bugs per engagement.
Moreover, Immunefi found major differences in vulnerability detection costs. Competitions averaged $6,548 to identify a critical bug. Private top-tier audits averaged about $66,000.
Researchers Prevent Hundreds of Threats
Meanwhile, attackers could have caused far greater losses without early detection. Immunefi said researchers prevented 374 threats through bounty programs in July.
That figure climbed from 317 in June and 339 in May. Consequently, cumulative researcher payouts reached $143.1 million.
Significantly, the figures show that proactive security testing can reduce potential losses. Hence, bug bounties remain an important defense for crypto projects.
Related: Coinsbuy Suffers $8M Cross-Chain Hack as Stolen Crypto Moves to Monero
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