Incident All ledgers
xToken: $24.0m
xToken lost $24.0m on 12 May 2021. Ranked 119th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 12 May 2021
- Lost
- $24.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Oracle Manipulation
- Method
- Spot Price Manipulation
- Chains
- Ethereum
On May 12, 2021, xToken lost about $24 million after an attacker used an $81M dYdX flash loan to manipulate a Kyber Network oracle and mint xSNXa tokens at distorted prices; a separate xBNTa contract flaw allowed minting with any token.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 119th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 26th in 2021.
- It accounts for 8.4% of the $287.1m in known losses in May 2021.
- 159 incidents in the ledger are classified as Oracle Manipulation, for $894.1m in total. This one is 2.7% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named xToken
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Aug 2021 | xToken | $4.5m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 Oct 2020 | Harvest Finance | $24.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 12 Apr 2022 | Elephant Money | $22.2m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 06 Nov 2022 | Pando Rings | $22.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 10 Jun 2024 | UwU Lend | $20.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 16 Apr 2026 | Rhea Lend | $18.4m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
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, “xToken, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/xtoken-2021-05-12/. How this is built