Incident All ledgers
KuCoin: $281.0m
KuCoin lost $281.0m on 29 September 2020. Ranked 17th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 29 September 2020
- Lost
- $281.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Ethereum
In late September 2020, attackers took KuCoin's hot wallet private keys and stole about $280 million; the attack was attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group. KuCoin recovered $235 million through on-chain tracking, contract upgrades, and law enforcement help.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 17th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 2nd in 2020.
- It accounts for 93.0% of the $302.2m in known losses in September 2020.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 3.1% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named KuCoin
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 Apr 2023 | KuCoin | $22,628 | CEX | Social Account Takeover | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 07 Feb 2014 | Mt. Gox | $470.0m | CEX | Private Key Compromised | — |
| 24 Sept 2026 | Bitget | $387.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 09 Feb 2024 | PlayDapp | $290.0m | DeFi Protocol | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 21 Apr 2018 | Gate | $235.0m | CEX | Private Key Compromised | — |
| 04 Dec 2021 | BitMart | $196.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet 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, “KuCoin, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/kucoin-2020-09-29/. How this is built