Incident All ledgers
Exmo: $10.5m
Exmo lost $10.5m on 21 December 2020. Ranked 190th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 21 December 2020
- Lost
- $10.5m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Multiple
Crypto exchange EXMO lost about $10.5 million after attackers drained its compromised hot wallets on December 21, taking roughly 5% of its total assets across BTC, ETH, XRP, ETC, ZEC and USDT in a coordinated withdrawal.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 190th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 8th in 2020.
- It accounts for 0.3% of the $3.56bn in known losses in December 2020.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 0.1% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 Dec 2022 | Defrost | $12.0m | DeFi Protocol | Private Key Compromised | $6.0m |
| 10 Feb 2022 | Dego Finance | $10.0m | DeFi Protocol | Deployer Key Compromised | — |
| 24 Jul 2026 | Triple-A | $9.7m | Payments | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 29 Jul 2014 | Cryptsy | $9.6m | CEX | Private Key Compromised | — |
| 06 Jun 2019 | GateHub | $9.5m | CEX | Private Key Compromised | — |
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, “Exmo, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/exmo-2020-12-21/. How this is built