Incident All ledgers
AscenDEX: $77.0m
AscenDEX lost $77.0m on 11 December 2021. Ranked 54th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 11 December 2021
- Lost
- $77.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Ethereum, BSC, Polygon
On December 11, 2021, the AscendEX exchange found that about $77 million had been moved without authorization from its hot wallets on Ethereum, BSC and Polygon. Compromised private keys were blamed, likely through phishing or malware.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 54th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 11th in 2021.
- It accounts for 13.1% of the $588.3m in known losses in December 2021.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 0.9% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19 Aug 2021 | Liquid Global | $91.3m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 22 Nov 2023 | Heco Bridge | $86.6m | DeFi Protocol | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 23 Jan 2025 | Phemex | $85.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 21 Jun 2021 | StakeHound / Fireblocks | $72.0m | DeFi Protocol | Key Brute Forced | — |
| 02 Aug 2016 | Bitfinex | $72.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
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, “AscenDEX, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/ascendex-2021-12-11/. How this is built