Incident All ledgers
Gate: $235.0m
Gate lost $235.0m on 21 April 2018. Ranked 18th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 21 April 2018
- Lost
- $235.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Private Key Compromised
Gate.io lost about $230M on April 21, 2018 after North Korean hackers compromised its private keys and drained BTC, ETH, DOGE and other tokens. The exchange kept the breach hidden until an on-chain investigator exposed it in 2024.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 18th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 2nd in 2018.
- It accounts for 98.6% of the $238.3m in known losses in April 2018.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 2.6% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 Sept 2026 | Bitget | $387.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 09 Feb 2024 | PlayDapp | $290.0m | DeFi Protocol | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 29 Sept 2020 | KuCoin | $281.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 04 Dec 2021 | BitMart | $196.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 13 Dec 2021 | Vulcan Forged | $140.0m | DeFi Protocol | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
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, “Gate, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/gate-2018-04-21/. How this is built