Revenue from crypto-related criminal offense dropped past more than one-half in 2020 according to Chainalysis' annual study on the field of study.

Cybercriminals netted around $5 billion less than the $10 billion plus they got away with in 2019, representing a 53% fall.

Transactions involving illicit funds have decreased even more than quickly than the total volume of those funds, falling from 2.one% of all transactions analyzed in 2019 downward to merely 0.34% last yr.

Amidst the viii categories of transactions deemed "illicit" by Chainalysis, the dollar amount of crypto taken in by scams decreased the nearly, by 71% to $2.6B, largely due to the fact that 2019's multi-billion dollar PlusToken scandal dwarfed annihilation seen in 2020 so far.

Overall crypto criminal offence volume — including the proceeds of crime and the attempts to wash it — fell from above $20B in 2019 to around $10B last year.

But it's not all proficient news and peradventure the nearly alarming part of the report is the finding that ransomware-related theft rose 311% from 2019 to 2020, representing an additional loss of more than $250 meg in 2020 compared to 2019.

Even with a year-over-year increase in ransomware and darknet market activity, Chainalysis says the outlook on crypto crime "has never been meliorate," thanks to recent advancements in regulatory and compliance processes.

"The expert news is three-fold: Cryptocurrency-related criminal offense is falling, information technology remains a small part of the overall cryptocurrency economy, and information technology is comparatively smaller to the amount of illicit funds involved in traditional finance."

Chainalysis' conclusions broadly echo those put forth in a recent report by security firm CipherTrace, which plant that crypto-related crime dropped by 57% in 2020.

According to Chainalysis, the large ascent in ransomware is due to the introduction of "new strains taking in large sums from victims," which, when combined with pre-existing ransomware strains, accounted for nearly $350 one thousand thousand of cryptocurrency theft in 2020.

Although the origins of ransomware attacks may seem disparate and random, Chainalysis believes that the infrastructure attackers need to launder crypto into cash "may be controlled by just a few primal players," like to the origins of the ransomware itself.

Chainalysis besides notes that the increasing collection of personal identifying information from exchanges has finer forced criminals to "rely on a surprisingly small-scale group of service providers" to exchange sick-gotten crypto holdings into fiat.

"In the long run, (compliance) efforts past exchanges volition also remove some of the incentive to use cryptocurrency in criminal activity, as it volition go much harder for cyber criminals to convert cryptocurrency into cash if they can't use exchanges."

Last month, the Section of Justice appear it had confiscated $454,000 in cryptocurrency from a ransomware operator; the bust being the result of a collaboration with Chainalysis.