Incident All ledgers
Eminence: $15.0m
Eminence lost $15.0m on 28 September 2020. Ranked 157th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 28 September 2020
- Lost
- $15.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Oracle Manipulation
- Method
- Spot Price Manipulation
- Chains
- Ethereum
Eminence, an incomplete and unaudited DeFi project, lost about $15 million less than three hours after launch. The attacker used 15M DAI borrowed from Uniswap to buy EMN, burned half for eAAVE to inflate the price, then cashed out of the bonding curve at that manipulated price.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 157th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 6th in 2020.
- It accounts for 5.0% of the $302.2m in known losses in September 2020.
- 159 incidents in the ledger are classified as Oracle Manipulation, for $894.1m in total. This one is 1.7% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Apr 2026 | Rhea Lend | $18.4m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 14 Oct 2021 | Indexed Finance | $16.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 02 Apr 2022 | Inverse Finance Frontier | $15.6m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 28 Apr 2022 | DEUS Finance | $13.4m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 13 Apr 2023 | Yearn Finance | $11.5m | DeFi Protocol | Oracle Misconfiguration | — |
All failures in 2020 · 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, “Eminence, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/eminence-2020-09-28/. How this is built