The Parity wallet bug from 2017 is the classic example so far, where someone who was just messing around with the smart contract 'accidentally' locked up $280m in assets[1]. I've linked to the GitHub thread below...this person didn't get anything from the exploit, and it wasn't for street cred (they deleted their account).

https://github.com/openethereum/parity-ethereum/issues/6995#...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-froz...

Even being able to grind a smart contract to a halt would be very profitable if you shorted it right beforehand.

Even then you are limited things to people who are willing to break the law and have a giant sign pointing them as a likely culprit.

I mean people short crypto all the time, averaged over a long enough period of time long/short ratios are roughly ~50/50 [1]. It's normal market behavior. And if you're shorting one of the big ones, you can most likely do it on defi without even providing a name.

1: https://www.bybt.com/LongShortRatio

Let’s assume something like 100 people have very large* short positions on a system that goes down. Dropping the possibility from X,000,000,000 to 100 is quite a big deal.

*very large being required for significant money to be at stake, making say 10k illegally from a short is hardly going to inspire a lot of effort.