CertiK focuses specifically on this last type of threat, which was generated by the introduction of flash loans: a decentralized financing system that allows borrowers to access extraordinarily huge sums of cryptocurrency for very short periods of time. Flash loans can be used maliciously to influence the value of a certain token on exchanges or to buy up all of the governance tokens in a project and vote to remove all of the funds, as happened to Beanstalk in April.
According to CertiK’s study, a total of $308 million was lost across 27 flash loan attacks in Q2 2022 – a massive rise from the $14 million lost to flash loans in Q1.
