New Delhi, Jul 8 (IANS): Blockchain projects around Web3.0 lost more than $2 billion to hacks and exploits in the first six months this year, a new report has shown.

According to Blockchain auditing and security company CertiK, this year's hacking figure is more than all of 2021 combined.

About $308 million were lost across 27 flash loan attacks in the second quarter, from $14 million in Q1.

Flash loans are a decentralised finance (DeFi) mechanism that lets borrowers access extremely large amounts of cryptocurrency for very short periods of time.

If used maliciously, flash loans can be used to manipulate the value of a certain token on exchanges or buy up all of the governance tokens in a project and vote to withdraw all of the funds, as happened to Beanstalk in April, reports The Verge.

About $37.46 million was lost to "rug pulls" in Q2, down 16.5 per cent from the previous quarter.

A rug pull in the crypto industry is when a development team suddenly abandons a project and sells or removes all its liquidity.

Another report from Immunefi, a leading bug bounty platform, claimed this week that the global cryptocurrency market lost at least $670 million in the April-June quarter (Q2), and 97 per cent of the losses were due to hacks and scams.

The crypto losses in the second quarter were up 52 per cent from $440 million in the same period last year.

"The majority of these funds was lost by four specific projects, Beanstalk known as a decentralized stablecoin protocol, the Harmony Horizon Bridge, Mirror Protocol, and Fei Protocol," according to data from Immunefi.

Nearly 46,000 Americans reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to scams since early 2021, according to a recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report.