Incident All ledgers
Cryptopia: $16.0m
Cryptopia lost $16.0m on 14 January 2019. Ranked 151st of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 14 January 2019
- Lost
- $16.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Ethereum
In January 2019, attackers compromised the private keys to Cryptopia's hot wallet and stole about $16 million in ERC-20 tokens, roughly a tenth of the exchange's holdings, affecting some 17,000 customer accounts.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 151st of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 7th in 2019.
- It accounts for 98.5% of the $16.2m in known losses in January 2019.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 0.2% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Cryptopia
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 Feb 2021 | Cryptopia | $45,000 | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21 Oct 2026 | CoinDCX | $16.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 29 Apr 2024 | Rain | $14.8m | CEX | Private Key Compromised | — |
| 08 Apr 2023 | GDAC | $13.9m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 16 Apr 2026 | Grinex | $13.7m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 31 Oct 2024 | M2 Exchange | $13.7m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
All failures in 2019 · 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, “Cryptopia, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/cryptopia-2019-01-14/. How this is built