Incident All ledgers
Bitfinex: $72.0m
Bitfinex lost $72.0m on 2 August 2016. Ranked 56th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 2 August 2016
- Lost
- $72.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Bitcoin
An attacker compromised Bitfinex's hot wallet private keys and took 119,756 bitcoins, worth about $72 million. The exchange paused trading and withdrawals during its investigation.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 56th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 1st in 2016.
- It accounts for 100.0% of the $72.0m in known losses in August 2016.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 0.8% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Bitfinex
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 May 2015 | Bitfinex | $329,000 | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Jan 2025 | Phemex | $85.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 11 Dec 2021 | AscenDEX | $77.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 21 Jun 2021 | StakeHound / Fireblocks | $72.0m | DeFi Protocol | Key Brute Forced | — |
| 26 Jul 2023 | AlphaPo | $60.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 14 Sept 2018 | Zaif | $60.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
All failures in those years · 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, “Bitfinex, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/bitfinex-2016-08-02/. How this is built