In September 2020, Singapore-headquartered crypto exchange KuCoin revealed that $275m worth of cryptocurrency had been stolen, including $127m in ERC20 tokens, which are used in Ethereum smart contracts.
"I was even asked if I was Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin."īut in 2016, a US investigation concluded that Mt.
“I was asked about the missing Bitcoins," he told reporters. Gox at the time of the theft, was later arrested on unrelated charges and, he claims, interrogated for eight hours a day. Around 7% of all Bitcoin in circulation at the time, the haul was then worth around $480m. Soon after, it revealed that up to 850,000 Bitcoins had gone missing, presumed stolen. In February of that year, it abruptly suspended trading, closed its exchange services and filed for bankruptcy protection. Gox was handling over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions. Gox, in 2014.įounded in 2010 as a site for trading ‘Magic the Gathering’ game cards, by 2014 Mt. The first widely publicised - and perhaps still the best-known - crypto heist was the theft of $480m in Bitcoin from another Japanese exchange, Mt. It is still unknown who undertook the attack, but more than 30 people have been arrested in Japan in connection with selling the stolen assets. A few months later, Coincheck was acquired by financial services provider Monex Group. The country's financial regulator, the Financial Services Association, ordered all exchanges to report on their cybersecurity defences.Īt the time of the attack, Coincheck was one of the most high-profile exchanges in Japan, which was then among the biggest markets for crypto trading. Shortly after the incident, 16 of Japan's crypto exchanges merged to form a self-regulatory body. The company admitted that it had stored the assets in a 'hot wallet', meaning a cryptocurrency store that is connected to the internet and therefore vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches. In January 2018, Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck revealed that $547m in lesser-known cryptocurrency NEM had been stolen. "While lessons need to be learned for sure," he wrote, "we need to be aware of the progress made so far by the DeFi community intents and purposes less than a decade old." 3. Shortly after the theft, Steven Dickens, senior analyst at technology research company Futurum, wrote that it was likely to bolster the security of decentralised finance (DeFi) systems in the long run, but discredit them in the short term. While some speculated that they may have struggled to sell the tokens, someone claiming to be the attacker said they had only stolen them "for fun".īy the end of the week, all assets were returned, Poly Network said, except $33m-worth of 'stablecoin' Tether, which had been frozen immediately after the attack. According to analysis by security researcher Mudit Gupta, the attacker had found a way to 'unlock' (ie buy) tokens on the Poly Network protocol without 'locking' (ie selling) the corresponding tokens on other blockchains.įortunately for Poly Network, the attacker began returning the tokens the next day. On August 10th 2021, a hacker transferred $611m-worth of Poly Network tokens to three wallets under their control. The second biggest crypto theft of all time is last year's $611m theft from Poly Network, a smart contract platform that allows users to exchange tokens between disparate blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. "We know trust needs to be earned and are using every resource at our disposal to deploy the most sophisticated security measures and processes to prevent future attacks," the company said. “Traditional financial companies have grown up knowing that you have to have layers of protection… in order for folks to entrust you with their money,” says Chris Caruana, VP of AML solutions at financial crime solutions platform Feedzai. But the biggest crypto hack by value is also the most recent, suggesting there be many more lessons left to learn. Proponents argue that the crypto ecosystem is having to learn in a few years, lessons the conventional finance sector has had centuries to perfect. The biggest crypto hack of all time, so far, is also one of the most recent. The biggest crypto hacks of all time, listed below, reveal an industry slowly and painfully learning why the privilege of handling millions of dollars worth of digital assets comes with a responsibility for faultless security. Not only has the price of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin careened like a rollercoaster, but the market has also been subjected to a barrage of cybersecurity breaches. But that growth has been far from smooth. The market cap of all digital assets reached $3tn in November last year, a 21,000% increase since 2016.
US president Joe Biden’s executive order on cryptocurrencies in March 2022 included a reminder of the market’s staggering recent growth.
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