Incident All ledgers
Defrost: $12.0m
Defrost lost $12.0m on 24 December 2022. Ranked 176th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 24 December 2022
- Lost
- $12.0m
- Returned or repaid
- $6.0m
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Private Key Compromised
- Chains
- Avalanche
On December 24, 2022, Defrost Finance on Avalanche was hit by two attacks: a flashloan price manipulation on V2 and a compromised V1 admin key used with a fake oracle, together draining about $12M. All funds were later returned.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 176th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 27th in 2022.
- It accounts for 22.2% of the $54.2m in known losses in December 2022.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 0.1% of that.
- $6.0m is recorded as returned or repaid, 50.0% of the amount taken.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Apr 2026 | Grinex | $13.7m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 31 Oct 2024 | M2 Exchange | $13.7m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 22 Nov 2023 | HTX | $13.6m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 05 Aug 2026 | KITE Foundation | $13.3m | Wallet | Private Key Compromised | — |
| 21 Dec 2020 | Exmo | $10.5m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
All failures in 2022 · 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, “Defrost, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/defrost-2022-12-24/. How this is built