Incident All ledgers
Alpha Finance: $37.5m
Alpha Finance lost $37.5m on 13 February 2021. Ranked 88th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 13 February 2021
- Lost
- $37.5m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Protocol Logic
- Method
- Borrow Logic Flaw
- Chains
- Ethereum
Alpha Finance lost about $37.5 million when an attacker used recursive flash loans to borrow against inflated sUSD debt in CREAM's Iron Bank. A rounding error in the borrow function's math allowed undercollateralized lending to be manipulated.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 88th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 18th in 2021.
- It accounts for 57.3% of the $65.4m in known losses in February 2021.
- 164 incidents in the ledger are classified as Protocol Logic, for $293.4m in total. This one is 12.8% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Alpha
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Oct 2021 | Alpha Homora | $147,000 | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 02 Nov 2026 | Mercado Bitcoin | $40.0m | CEX | Protocol Logic | — |
| 30 Nov 2021 | MonoX | $31.4m | DeFi Protocol | Swap Logic Flaw | — |
| 03 Aug 2021 | Popsicle Finance | $20.7m | DeFi Protocol | Reward Logic Flaw | — |
| 17 May 2021 | BearnFi | $18.0m | DeFi Protocol | Withdrawal Logic Flaw | — |
| 25 Mar 2025 | Abracadabra Spell | $13.0m | DeFi Protocol | Liquidation Logic Flaw | — |
All failures in 2021 · The failures ledger
Amounts are DefiLlama’s estimates and can change as incidents are revalued. Its returned figure can include money a company repaid itself, not only funds recovered from attackers. Source: DefiLlama.
Cite this Bitminer.io, “Alpha Finance, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/alpha-finance-2021-02-13/. How this is built