According to a report by AnChain.ai – a blockchain security company – more than $6 million are transferred by non-human accounts, which threatens the blockchain ecosystem.
AnChain’s CEO Victor Feng and his colleagues conducted an in-depth analysis of how tokens in the DApp community are transferred through the blockchain. The most extensive study concerning DApps, found that over 75% of all DApp transactions were placed by software programmes and not humans. A little over half of the accounts actually were recorded as human interactions.
Deploying bots into the ecosystem can lead to harmful effects and frauds as the metrics at which DApps are compared – transaction volumes, user activity, and trading volumes - can be exploited.
Exploiting those metrics can create unfair rankings, advantages/disadvanatges and even fraudulent competition among DApp companies. An example of that is the recent theft of $4million tokens from various accounts from a gambling website. The attack was guided by 50,000 bots, each of them with self-destruction mechanisms built in them. The sophisticated fraud eventually was pointed to five addresses on Ethereum’s blockchain.
The company used artificial intelligence to discover repeating patterns in user activity, such as repetitive buy/sell options, and also to monitor suspicious moves.
“The bots are a feature, not a vulnerability in decentralized blockchain ecosystems. Bots manage to find an open door in transactions and can be undetected for months, even years. The blockchain ecosystem has still a long way to go, but further in time its security will be highly increased”, Fang stated.
The EOS examination confirmed to a certain degree BitWise’s statement that 95% of reported Bitcoin trading volumes are not real.
Globally, more than 40 percent of the entire Internet traffic in 2018 was in the grasp of bots (Google, Bing, Yandex, and other search engines used crawlers to rank and sort websites).
AnChain.AI is the first company to utilize the use of deep learning to “look inside” transactions and user activity. The study shows that EOS blockchain should be deployed to overcome this issue.
“There is no other explanation about why the runner-ups use bots, except to augment the metrics and have the leading edge over the other DApps,” Fang added.
The fraudulent behavior in the DApp community has a long-term adverse effect on the entire crypto ecosystem, pushing investors and enthusiasts away, and that’s vital for a developing industry.
The cure, ironically, is by using “good bots,” which can be used for finding and destroying potential harms in the ecosystems. Good bots can also be used as a “virtual companion” when there is no human to play against.