Incident All ledgers
Phemex: $85.0m
Phemex lost $85.0m on 23 January 2025. Ranked 49th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 23 January 2025
- Lost
- $85.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- CEX
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Bitcoin, BSC, Sui, Base, Tron
On January 23, 2025, attackers who compromised hot wallet private keys and signing infrastructure drained Singapore-based exchange Phemex's hot wallets across more than a dozen chains, with reported losses between $69.1M and $85M.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 49th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 5th in 2025.
- It accounts for 79.6% of the $106.7m in known losses in January 2025.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 0.9% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
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 | — |
| 19 Aug 2021 | Liquid Global | $91.3m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 22 Nov 2023 | Heco Bridge | $86.6m | DeFi Protocol | 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 2025 · 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, “Phemex, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/phemex-2025-01-23/. How this is built