- Illegal crrypto transactions could have hit as much as $ 51 billion in 2024, according to chainalysis
- With the introduction of ETFs, the relationship between volume of crime and industry dropped significantly
- Criminals move away from BTC and into stableecoins
Cryptocurrency addresses known to be associated with criminals received $ 40 billion in 2024, marking another hugely successful year for wrong doers around the world.
The annual report from Chainalysis notes that this is not an accurate number and when time goes by and new information arises on previous crimes, it is likely to rise – possibly to be closer to $ 51 billion.
Another important detail is that this estimate does not include money from non-crypto native crime, such as drug trafficking or money laundering.
Stableecoins
The figure in 2023 amounted to $ 46.1 billion, so if Chainalyses’ estimates turn out to be true, it will be a significant increase – in raw numbers, as a percentage, the figure has dropped significantly.
By 2023, the ratio of crime volume and industry volume was $ 0.61% – but with the approval of several spot -TFs in 2024, many large institutions and investors with large pockets moved into the industry, increasing the total volume and thus shrunken relationship to only 0.14%.
Finally, cyber criminals look to move away from Bitcoin and into stableecoins.
So far, when a ransomware attack (or a similar incident) happens, most threat actors would require payment in Bitcoin, despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of different cryptocurrencies. That said, four years ago, about 70% of all criminal transactions made in Bitcoin, which fell to 20% last year. At the same time, stableecoins moved in (cryptocurrency, whose value is linked to Fiat currency and does not swing violently as standard crypto does), now takes about 63%.
Monero was used in 10% of cases, chainalysis added. Monero is a popular privacy -oriented coin that is also extracted through the notorious crypto jackets called XMRig.
