Incident All ledgers
Wintermute: $160.0m
Wintermute lost $160.0m on 20 September 2022. Ranked 27th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 20 September 2022
- Lost
- $160.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- Other
- Category
- Social Engineering
- Method
- Phishing
- Chains
- Ethereum
On September 20, 2022, Wintermute lost about $160M when its DeFi hot wallet was compromised; the attacker brute-forced a private key generated with a weak 32-bit seed by the Profanity vanity address tool. Only DeFi operations were affected.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 27th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 7th in 2022.
- It accounts for 97.1% of the $164.9m in known losses in September 2022.
- 61 incidents in the ledger are classified as Social Engineering, for $3.12bn in total. This one is 5.1% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Wintermute
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 05 Jun 2022 | Wintermute | $17.6m | DeFi Protocol | Improper Access Control | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31 May 2024 | DMM Bitcoin | $305.0m | CEX | Phishing | $305.0m |
| 18 Jul 2024 | WazirX: India | $234.9m | CEX | Signer Phishing | — |
| 10 Nov 2023 | Poloniex | $126.0m | CEX | Malware | — |
| 18 Jun 2025 | Nobitex | $82.0m | CEX | Malware | — |
| 19 Apr 2021 | EasyFi | $59.0m | DeFi Protocol | Malware | — |
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-2022-09-20/. How this is built