Incident All ledgers
US Government Crypto Wallet: $20.0m
US Government Crypto Wallet lost $20.0m on 24 October 2024. Ranked 134th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 24 October 2024
- Lost
- $20.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- Other
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Private Key Compromised
- Chains
- Ethereum
On October 24, 2024, the private key of a dormant US government wallet holding about $20M from 2016 Bitfinex seizures was compromised and drained of ETH, USDC, aUSDC and USDT. About $19.3M was recovered within a day, while roughly $700K went to instant exchanges.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 134th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 16th in 2024.
- It accounts for 19.3% of the $103.5m in known losses in October 2024.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 0.2% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Aug 2021 | Bilaxy | $21.7m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 24 Sept 2025 | SBI Crypto | $21.0m | Other | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 16 Nov 2024 | DEXX | $21.0m | Wallet | Private Key Compromised | — |
| 29 Mar 2019 | Bithumb | $19.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 10 Jan 2022 | Lympo | $18.7m | NFTfi | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
All failures in 2024 · 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, “US Government Crypto Wallet, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/us-government-crypto-wallet-2024-10-24/. How this is built