Incident All ledgers
The DAO: $60.0m
The DAO lost $60.0m on 17 June 2016. Ranked 64th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 17 June 2016
- Lost
- $60.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Reentrancy
- Method
- Reentrancy
- Chains
- Ethereum
On June 17, 2016, an attacker exploited a reentrancy flaw in The DAO on Ethereum, repeatedly calling splitDAO before balances updated and draining about 3.6M ETH, valued near $60M.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 64th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 2nd in 2016.
- It accounts for 100.0% of the $60.0m in known losses in June 2016.
- 61 incidents in the ledger are classified as Reentrancy, for $458.1m in total. This one is 13.1% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 May 2022 | Rari Capital | $80.0m | DeFi Protocol | Reentrancy | — |
| 30 Jul 2023 | Curve DEX | $61.7m | DeFi Protocol | Vyper Compiler Bug | — |
| 09 Jul 2025 | GMX V1 EVM | $42.0m | DeFi Protocol | Reentrancy | $40.0m |
| 18 Dec 2021 | Grim Finance | $30.0m | DeFi Protocol | Reentrancy | — |
| 03 Sept 2024 | Penpie | $27.0m | DeFi Protocol | Reentrancy | — |
All failures in those years · 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, “The DAO, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/the-dao-2016-06-17/. How this is built