Incident All ledgers
Wintermute: $17.6m
Wintermute lost $17.6m on 5 June 2022. Ranked 147th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 5 June 2022
- Lost
- $17.6m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Access Control
- Method
- Improper Access Control
- Chains
- Optimism
In June 2022, Wintermute lost 20 million Optimism tokens, valued at about $17.6 million, after a multisig address supplied for deposit had not been deployed on Optimism; an attacker deployed the Safe contract at that address first and took the tokens.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 147th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 22nd in 2022.
- It accounts for 7.0% of the $249.9m in known losses in June 2022.
- 225 incidents in the ledger are classified as Access Control, for $1.96bn in total. This one is 0.9% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Wintermute
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 Sept 2022 | Wintermute | $160.0m | Other | Phishing | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 Mar 2024 | Curio | $16.0m | DeFi Protocol | Delegatecall Hijack | — |
| 27 May 2026 | SUPERFORTUNE AI | $15.2m | Token | Improper Access Control | — |
| 27 Feb 2021 | Furucombo | $14.0m | DeFi Protocol | Delegatecall Hijack | — |
| 28 May 2025 | Cork V1 | $12.0m | DeFi Protocol | Improper Access Control | — |
| 06 Aug 2024 | Ronin Bridge | $12.0m | DeFi Protocol | Uninitialized Proxy | — |
All failures in 2022 · 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, “Wintermute, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/wintermute-2022-06-05/. How this is built