DeFi & exchange archive
The biggest DeFi & crypto hacks of the last 10 years
A chronological record of major DeFi exploits, bridge hacks, oracle attacks, and centralized-exchange compromises from 2016 through 2026 — with loss amounts, attack vector, and outcome.
All hacks, latest first
AFX Trade
A fake recruiter from a non-existent firm got an AFX Trade developer to clone a malicious repository on July 9; a hidden payload gave the attacker the developer's machine and, with it, the protocol's bridge keys.
- Outcome
- AFX Trade publicly offered the attacker a cut of the funds to return the rest and recovered most of the loss.
Ostium
The largest oracle attack of 2026: stale and spoofed price timestamps were fed to Ostium's perpetuals engine, letting the attacker open and settle positions at prices that never existed.
- Outcome
- Arbitrum's base layer was unaffected. Ostium paused markets and published a post-mortem.
Cork Protocol
A flaw in Cork's depeg-swap accounting allowed an attacker to extract wstETH from the protocol's pools.
- Outcome
- Protocol paused. Partial white-hat recovery.
Kelp DAO (rsETH)
A compromise of Kelp DAO's bridging and messaging infrastructure let attackers mint and drain rsETH liquidity across roughly twenty LayerZero-connected chains — the largest crypto theft of 2026 so far.
- Outcome
- Attributed to North Korea-linked actors. Funds laundered through mixers; largely unrecovered.
Drift Protocol
Months of patient social engineering gave attackers control of privileged Drift infrastructure, which they used to drain protocol funds and bridge them to Ethereum.
- Outcome
- Attributed to DPRK. On-chain trackers followed $44.4M into Tornado Cash before the wallet was emptied.
Step Finance
Attackers obtained privileged keys and drained treasury and user funds from Step Finance contracts.
- Outcome
- Investigation ongoing; funds not recovered.
Balancer V2
A rounding-error bug in Balancer's composable stable pool math let crafted swaps extract value from the gap between internal accounting and real pool balances, across several chains at once.
- Outcome
- Vulnerable pools disabled; tens of millions recovered by white hats and distributed back to LPs.
BtcTurk
Turkey's oldest exchange reported unusual hot-wallet outflows consistent with compromised private keys; cold-storage reserves were untouched.
- Outcome
- Deposits and withdrawals halted, wallets rotated. Binance froze part of the stolen funds.
CoinDCX
A server-side breach gave an attacker access to CoinDCX's internal systems and its operational hot wallets.
- Outcome
- Exchange covered the loss from treasury; customer funds unaffected.
GMX V1
A reentrancy-style flaw in a contract connected to the GLP liquidity pool let the attacker repeatedly withdraw more than their share.
- Outcome
- The exploiter returned the bulk of the funds in exchange for a bounty. GMX V1 was wound down.
Nobitex
Iran's largest exchange had its hot wallets drained during the Israel–Iran conflict. The politically motivated attackers burned much of the loot to vanity addresses rather than cashing out.
- Outcome
- Service gradually restored; wallet infrastructure rotated. Funds not recoverable.
Cetus
An overflow check flaw in Cetus's concentrated-liquidity math let an attacker mint near-worthless positions and drain roughly $223M of liquidity from the largest DEX on Sui.
- Outcome
- Sui validators froze ~$162M of the stolen funds; most was later returned to users.
Infini
An overlooked developer privilege left in Infini's contracts was used to drain protocol-controlled stablecoin reserves.
- Outcome
- Operations paused; access controls rebuilt. Partial clawback discussions with white hats.
Bybit
North Korea's Lazarus Group compromised a Safe{Wallet} signer's machine and tricked Bybit's cold-wallet signers into approving a malicious upgrade, draining ~401K ETH in the largest crypto theft ever recorded.
- Outcome
- Bybit covered user losses from its treasury. FBI attributed to TraderTraitor / Lazarus.
Phemex
Attackers drained BTC, ETH and stablecoins from Phemex hot wallets in rapid succession, in an incident security firms linked to North Korean groups.
- Outcome
- Exchange covered user balances and rebuilt key management. Stolen funds routed through mixers.
WazirX
Attackers (linked to Lazarus Group) compromised WazirX's Liminal multi-sig and drained the exchange's hot wallet.
- Outcome
- Exchange paused withdrawals; restructuring scheme proposed to repay users.
DMM Bitcoin
Japanese exchange DMM Bitcoin lost 4,502.9 BTC in an unauthorized withdrawal later attributed to North Korean actors.
- Outcome
- DMM borrowed funds to make customers whole, then wound down the exchange in late 2024.
Poloniex
Justin Sun-owned Poloniex saw its hot wallets drained across Ethereum, Tron and Bitcoin networks after a private-key compromise.
- Outcome
- Sun committed to full reimbursement; partial on-chain recovery via bounty offer.
HTX / Heco Bridge
HTX (formerly Huobi) and the Heco cross-chain bridge were drained in coordinated exploits affecting hot wallets and bridge contracts.
- Outcome
- HTX pledged user reimbursement. Bridge paused.
Mixin Network
A cloud-service provider used by Mixin was breached, exposing keys to the network's main deposit/withdrawal wallet.
- Outcome
- Mixin offered partial repayment via tokenized debt; service paused.
Curve Finance
A Vyper compiler bug broke the reentrancy locks in several Curve stablepools (alETH, msETH, pETH, CRV/ETH), enabling reentrancy drains.
- Outcome
- White-hats recovered ~73% of funds. Vyper patched; Curve compensated remaining LPs.
Euler Finance
A missing health check in the donateToReserves function allowed the attacker to push accounts into a self-liquidatable state and drain lending pools.
- Outcome
- After negotiations the attacker returned essentially all funds — among the largest white-hat-style returns ever.
BonqDAO
The attacker manipulated the Tellor oracle price feed for AllianceBlock's ALBT token to mint BEUR stablecoin against worthless collateral.
- Outcome
- Most stolen tokens proved illiquid; protocol effectively wound down.
Mango Markets
Avraham Eisenberg pumped the MNGO perp price on thin spot liquidity, used the inflated collateral to borrow out the treasury.
- Outcome
- Eisenberg arrested by the FBI in December 2022 and convicted of fraud and market manipulation in 2024.
BNB Chain Token Hub Bridge
Attacker forged a fake Merkle proof in the Token Hub bridge and minted 2M BNB. Validators halted the chain mid-attack.
- Outcome
- BNB Chain stopped block production; ~$430M frozen. Net stolen ~$100–140M.
Nomad Bridge
A misconfigured initialization let any address spoof valid messages. Once one wallet started draining, hundreds copy-pasted the exploit calldata — the first 'free-for-all' bridge hack.
- Outcome
- Nomad recovered ~20% from white-hats; bridge effectively defunct.
Harmony Horizon Bridge
Lazarus Group compromised two of five multi-sig signers (held with insufficient separation) and drained the bridge.
- Outcome
- Attributed to North Korea by the FBI. Funds laundered via Tornado Cash.
Beanstalk Farms
Attacker took a flash loan to obtain a supermajority of governance stalk and instantly executed a malicious proposal that sent the treasury to themselves.
- Outcome
- Protocol redeployed months later via community-funded restart.
Ronin Bridge (Axie Infinity)
Lazarus Group socially engineered a Sky Mavis engineer via a fake LinkedIn job offer, compromising 5 of 9 bridge validator keys and draining 173,600 ETH + 25.5M USDC.
- Outcome
- Sky Mavis and Binance reimbursed users; OFAC sanctioned the laundering addresses.
Wormhole Bridge
Attacker forged signatures via a flawed signature-verification routine and minted 120K wETH on Solana without backing.
- Outcome
- Jump Crypto refilled the bridge from its own funds within 24 hours.
BitMart
Hot-wallet private keys for BitMart's Ethereum and BNB Chain wallets were stolen and drained.
- Outcome
- BitMart pledged to use its own funds to reimburse affected users.
Poly Network
Attacker exploited a privileged cross-chain function (EthCrossChainManager) to mint and withdraw assets across Ethereum, BSC and Polygon.
- Outcome
- Attacker ("Mr White Hat") returned virtually all funds within two weeks.
PancakeBunny
Flash-loan attack manipulated the BUNNY/BNB pool, minting ~7M BUNNY and crashing the token from $146 to near zero.
- Outcome
- Token never recovered; compensation plan via vBUNNY released later.
Uranium Finance
A migration to v2.1 contained an off-by-one math error in the swap fee logic, letting the attacker drain pool reserves in a single swap.
- Outcome
- Protocol shut down. Funds laundered via Tornado Cash.
bZx
Two back-to-back attacks pioneered the 'DeFi flash loan' playbook by manipulating oracle prices using uncollateralized loans from dYdX.
- Outcome
- First widely cited proof that flash loans break naive on-chain oracle designs. Catalyst for TWAP/Chainlink adoption.
Coincheck
Coincheck's NEM hot wallet was drained of 523M XEM after attackers planted malware via spear-phishing on employee machines.
- Outcome
- Coincheck reimbursed users from its own funds; later acquired by Monex Group. Catalyzed FSA regulation in Japan.
The DAO
A reentrancy bug in the split-DAO function let the attacker recursively drain 3.6M ETH from the largest crowdfunded smart contract.
- Outcome
- Ethereum hard-forked to reverse the theft, creating Ethereum Classic. Reshaped smart-contract security forever.
What 10 years of hacks tell us
- Bridges and centralized custodians dominate the losses. Ronin, Poly, Wormhole, Nomad, BNB Chain, Bybit, Coincheck — the largest single events have all been custody or cross-chain trust failures, not pure smart-contract bugs.
- North Korea (Lazarus / TraderTraitor) is the single biggest threat actor. Ronin, Harmony, DMM Bitcoin, WazirX and Bybit alone account for over $2.5B attributed to DPRK-linked groups.
- Self-custody with a hardware wallet sidesteps almost every entry on this list. Exchange and bridge hacks only affect funds you've handed to those operators.
- DeFi has matured but new vectors keep appearing. From reentrancy (The DAO) to flash loans (bZx) to compiler bugs (Curve/Vyper) to signer phishing (Bybit) — the attack surface evolves faster than audits cover.
Move funds off exchanges
Our hardware wallet comparison ranks devices by Secure Element design, air-gap, open-source status and supply-chain practices.
See the full comparison →Loss figures use values reported at the time of each incident from Chainalysis, Rekt.news, Elliptic, TRM Labs, official post-mortems and major-outlet reporting. This page tracks publicly disclosed incidents and is not exhaustive.