Incident All ledgers
Liquid Global: $91.3m
Liquid Global lost $91.3m on 19 August 2021. Ranked 46th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 19 August 2021
- Lost
- $91.3m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Ethereum
In August 2021, attackers compromised warm wallets at Japanese exchange Liquid Global and took roughly $91-97 million in assets such as BTC, ETH, TRX and XRP. The intrusion used data from an earlier November 2020 breach to get into the MPC wallet system.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 46th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 9th in 2021.
- It accounts for 11.4% of the $798.2m in known losses in August 2021.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 1.0% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Liquid
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 06 Sept 2026 | Liquid Network | $320.0m | Chain | Unbacked Cross-Chain Mint | — |
| 11 Sept 2026 | ether.fi Liquid | $43,260 | DeFi Protocol | Arbitrary External Call | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Jun 2022 | Harmony Bridge | $100.0m | DeFi Protocol | Validator Key Compromised | — |
| 22 Nov 2023 | Heco Bridge | $86.6m | DeFi Protocol | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 23 Jan 2025 | Phemex | $85.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 11 Dec 2021 | AscenDEX | $77.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 21 Jun 2021 | StakeHound / Fireblocks | $72.0m | DeFi Protocol | Key Brute Forced | — |
All failures in 2021 · 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, “Liquid Global, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/liquid-global-2021-08-19/. How this is built