Incident All ledgers
Bitcoin Gold: $18.0m
Bitcoin Gold lost $18.0m on 16 May 2018. Ranked 146th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 16 May 2018
- Lost
- $18.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- Chain
- Category
- Bridge & Cross-Chain
- Method
- Forged Proof
- Chains
- Bitcoin Gold
In May 2018, Bitcoin Gold was hit by a 51% attack in which attackers used double-spends against crypto exchanges, depositing and selling BTG before reversing the deposits, taking about 388,000 BTG (roughly $18M).
Against the ledger
- It ranks 146th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 8th in 2018.
- It accounts for 90.7% of the $19.8m in known losses in May 2018.
- 56 incidents in the ledger are classified as Bridge & Cross-Chain, for $1.53bn in total. This one is 1.2% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Bitcoin
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31 May 2024 | DMM Bitcoin | $305.0m | CEX | Phishing | $305.0m |
| 02 Nov 2026 | Mercado Bitcoin | $40.0m | CEX | Protocol Logic | — |
| 22 Apr 2025 | Bitcoin Mission | $1.3m | DeFi Protocol | Improper Access Control | — |
| 23 Jan 2020 | Bitcoin Gold | $70,000 | Layer 1 | Validator Key Compromised | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 04 Oct 2021 | pNetwork | $13.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spoofed Event Log | — |
| 17 May 2026 | Verus-Ethereum Bridge | $11.5m | DeFi Protocol | Forged Proof | — |
| 15 May 2026 | THORChain DEX | $10.7m | Chain | Bridge Logic Flaw | — |
| 07 Jun 2026 | Syscoin Bridge | $10.0m | DeFi Protocol | Forged Proof | — |
| 01 Jan 2025 | NoOnes | $7.9m | DeFi Protocol | Cross-Chain Message Spoofing | — |
On Bitminer.io
- Mercado Bitcoin loses $40 million four days after the $6.36 billion Binance incident
- El Salvador to Launch Education About Bitcoin
- Korean Drug Deals Use Bitcoin as a Payment
- “Bitcoin Jesus” in Debt With a Bankrupt Crypto Broker
- The Importance of Bitcoin’s Block Reward
All failures in 2018 · 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, “Bitcoin Gold, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/bitcoin-gold-2018-05-16/. How this is built