Incident All ledgers
Vulcan Forged: $140.0m
Vulcan Forged lost $140.0m on 13 December 2021. Ranked 30th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 13 December 2021
- Lost
- $140.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Key Compromise
- Method
- Hot Wallet Key Compromised
- Chains
- Ethereum, Polygon
In December 2021, an attacker compromised Venly's semi-custodial wallet servers, extracted credentials, and took about 4.5M PYR tokens ($140M) from 96 high-value Vulcan Forged marketplace wallets. Vulcan Forged refunded all losses within a day.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 30th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 4th in 2021.
- It accounts for 23.8% of the $588.3m in known losses in December 2021.
- 153 incidents in the ledger are classified as Key Compromise, for $8.96bn in total. This one is 1.6% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 04 Dec 2021 | BitMart | $196.0m | CEX | Hot Wallet Key Compromised | — |
| 30 Oct 2021 | BXH | $139.0m | DeFi Protocol | Private Key Compromised | — |
| 07 Jul 2023 | Multichain | $126.0m | DeFi Protocol | Validator Key Compromised | — |
| 31 Jul 2026 | COLDCARD | $116.0m | Wallet | Weak Key Generation | — |
| 23 Jun 2022 | Harmony Bridge | $100.0m | DeFi Protocol | Validator Key Compromised | — |
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, “Vulcan Forged, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/vulcan-forged-2021-12-13/. How this is built