Incident All ledgers
Bithumb: $31.0m
Bithumb lost $31.0m on 21 June 2018. Ranked 98th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 21 June 2018
- Lost
- $31.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Frontend & Infrastructure
- Method
- Key Leaked via Infrastructure
- Chains
- Ethereum
In June 2018, attackers breached South Korean exchange Bithumb's hot wallet through infrastructure weaknesses, taking about 35,000 ETH and other tokens worth roughly $31M. Bithumb blamed the North Korea-linked Lazarus group.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 98th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 6th in 2018.
- It accounts for 45.1% of the $68.8m in known losses in June 2018.
- 93 incidents in the ledger are classified as Frontend & Infrastructure, for $7.49bn in total. This one is 0.4% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Bithumb
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Mar 2019 | Bithumb | $19.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Feb 2022 | IRA Financial / Gemini | $36.0m | CEX | API Key Compromised | — |
| 18 Jan 2022 | Crypto-com | $33.7m | CEX | Session Key Compromised | — |
| 12 Jul 2019 | BitPoint | $27.6m | CEX | Key Leaked via Infrastructure | — |
| 16 Jul 2025 | BigONE | $27.0m | CEX | Supply Chain Attack | — |
| 18 Feb 2024 | FixedFloat | $26.1m | DeFi Protocol | Key Leaked via Infrastructure | — |
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, “Bithumb, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/bithumb-2018-06-21/. How this is built