$575 Million Lost Due to Common Ethereum and BNB Chain Mistakes

A new study has uncovered $575 million in losses from Ethereum and BNB Chain due to ordinary mistakes involving testnet addresses, reused contracts, and exposed private keys.

The researchers analyzed millions of addresses on both chains and found 65,340 high-risk instances tied to contract and externally owned account misuse.

This type of 'address misuse' refers to users accidentally sending their crypto to the wrong wallet, whether it's a test-network address that doesn't work on the real chain or an old or reused smart-contract address with its private key already exposed.

The study found that 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 resulted in much larger losses of 104,245 ETH and 9,045 BNB.