Incident All ledgers
MEV-Boost Relay: $20.0m
MEV-Boost Relay lost $20.0m on 3 April 2023. Ranked 137th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 3 April 2023
- Lost
- $20.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- Other
- Category
- Frontend & Infrastructure
- Method
- Key Leaked via Infrastructure
- Chains
- Ethereum
A malicious Ethereum validator abused a validation flaw in the mev-boost-relay software, using a malformed block header to see block contents early, then front-ran and swapped out MEV bot transactions, taking about $20M across 24 transactions.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 137th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 17th in 2023.
- It accounts for 22.0% of the $90.9m in known losses in April 2023.
- 93 incidents in the ledger are classified as Frontend & Infrastructure, for $7.49bn in total. This one is 0.3% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18 Feb 2024 | FixedFloat | $26.1m | DeFi Protocol | Key Leaked via Infrastructure | — |
| 18 Nov 2023 | Kronos Research | $26.0m | Other | API Key Compromised | — |
| 10 Sept 2024 | Indodax | $25.2m | CEX | Key Leaked via Infrastructure | — |
| 21 Mar 2026 | Resolv USR | $24.5m | DeFi Protocol | Key Leaked via Infrastructure | — |
| 11 Dec 2022 | 3Commas | $20.0m | CEX | Database Breach | — |
All failures in 2023 · 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, “MEV-Boost Relay, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/mev-boost-relay-2023-04-03/. How this is built