Incident All ledgers
Paid Network: $27.0m
Paid Network lost $27.0m on 5 March 2021. Ranked 109th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 5 March 2021
- Lost
- $27.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Token & Share Accounting
- Method
- Infinite Mint
- Chains
- Ethereum
On March 5, 2021, an attacker obtained the private key of PAID Network's deployment wallet, upgraded the token contract to allow unlimited minting, and created 59.4M unauthorized PAID tokens. The loss is recorded as $27,000,000.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 109th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 25th in 2021.
- It accounts for 33.4% of the $80.8m in known losses in March 2021.
- 160 incidents in the ledger are classified as Token & Share Accounting, for $1.45bn in total. This one is 1.9% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 Nov 2023 | KyberSwap Elastic | $48.0m | DeFi Protocol | Rounding Error | — |
| 02 May 2021 | Spartan | $30.5m | DeFi Protocol | Incorrect Share Accounting | — |
| 08 Jan 2026 | Truebit | $26.4m | DeFi Protocol | Arithmetic Error | — |
| 20 May 2024 | Gala | $22.3m | DeFi Protocol | Infinite Mint | — |
| 15 May 2024 | Sonne Finance | $20.0m | DeFi Protocol | Donation Attack | — |
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, “Paid Network, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/paid-network-2021-03-05/. How this is built