Biggest Heists In The History Of Crypto

Unlike traditionally where guns and physical violence were the norm, heists have evolved and are now often carried out behind a desk and a computer. Crypto, digital currencies, have been met by the wrath of hackers who simply identify a bug in the coding and utilize it as a weakness to gain access and control to a system and its data. By July 2023, it is estimated that over $77 billion has been lost to crypto hacks.
However, not all hackers have negative motives. Ethical hackers, also known as white-hat hackers, normally hack into systems to identify and fix vulnerabilities unlike black-hat hackers. There's also grey-hat hackers; coders who may unknowingly into a system without any intention of theft or harm, but may ask for a bounty in exchange for data.
Perhaps the biggest heist in crypto history will never correctly place any of the three hats on him/her, but it's a story that had many exchanges review their security for the better. Here are 8 times hackers shook the crypto industry.

PolyNetwork 2021 - $611m

Polynetwork is a collection of cross-chain collection of smart contracts that allow transactions between different blockchains. The network was exploited on 10st August 2021 transferring over $610m in crypto assets making one of the biggest if not the biggest cryptocurrency and DeFi hacks in the history of this space.
The events that followed the hack made it one of the few hacks with a happy ending. The unknown hacker, after unsuccessfully being unable to move the assets without traces, started a dialogue with Polynetwork through transactions over the Ethereum network. The platform offered a $500k bounty to the hacker and a job as Chief Security Advisor on Polynetwork which apparently the hacker declined.
The hacker then sent another public message via an etherscan transaction claiming he was "ready to return" the assets. And sure enough, he had returned $342m to the platform by the end of the following day. The remaining $268m was however still locked in an account that required both the hacker and the Poly Network.
The hacker then wrote on a public transaction: “Keep calm and this is the happy ending! I have to admit that my wild or mad behaviors have led to crises to your project, your team and even your lives. Sorry for the inconvenience! It must be one of the most wild adventures in our lives.”
“My actions, which may be considered weird, are my efforts to contribute to the security of the Poly project in my personal style,” they added. “The consensus was reached in a painful and obscure way, but it works. Some people even suspect that the whole story is a PR stunt.”
He finally gave access to the final tranche of the funds to Poly the following day except $3.3m worth of USDT that had by then been frozen by issuers.

Ronin 2022 - $540m

The Ronin Network describes itself as an EVM blockchain crafted for developers building games with player-owned economies. It is popularly known for its connectivity to Axie Infinity, a blockchain-based strategy game where players collect, own and trade an infinite variety of creatures called axies to battle as well as tokens.
On March 29, 2022, Ronin announced the theft of 173,600 ETH and 25.5m USDC an equivalent of $603m by that day's exchange rate. However, the actual hack had occurred 6 days earlier when the assets translated to $540m, comfortably securing its place in our list.
Hackers were able to access Ronin private keys and forged fake withdrawals. It all began with a fake job ad when a senior engineer at Sky Mavis, Ronin developers, was duped into applying to a job that didn't exist via LinkedIn. After several interviews and generous offers they were emailed a PDF and when the said file was downloaded, the spyware infiltrated Ronin's system and hackers took over 4 out of 9 validators from there.
The FBI linked the attack to North Korea hacker group Lazarus. So far only $30m has been recovered after hackers laundered the loot and sent it to centralized exchanges where they were seized.

Coincheck 2018 - $534m

Coincheck is a Japanese Tokyo-based crypto exchange and bitcoin wallet that was established in 2014. It boasts of 10 years of service and around 2 million users globally. It is regarded as one of the best exchanges. However, one security incident threatened to destroy it's reputation.
The heist has for 3 years been ranked #1 in crypto hacks, that is, before the PolyNetwork exploit. It was on January 26, 2018 at around 0300h, when hackers gained access to the platform's wallet holding Nem Foundation's coin known as Nem. 523 million coins were reportedly stolen. Even though Coincheck never disclosed details of the hack, it went ahead and paid all 200k+ affected users.
But the more intriguing part of the story is that none of the hackers was ever caught. The hackers were able to convert the XEM to Bitcoin and the wallets holding them visibly active and moving them to exchanges as recent as December 6, 2023 when 426.9 Bitcoin worth $22.2m by then was moved to an exchange.

Mt. Gox 2014 - $480m

This was another Tokyo based crypto exchange that operated from 2010 - 2014 before biting the dust due to security leniency. By the peak of its operation, it was the biggest exchange in the world.
Unlike the previously discussed hacks, Mt. Gox suffered a series of hacks that led to its ultimate downfall. Around 880,000 bitcoins was stolen from this platform. This represent about 6% of all bitcoins that will ever exist. If it would have happened today 16th of April 2024 with bitcoin trading at $62.5k as at the time of writing, it would mean $55,000,000,000 of stolen funds. The publicly known ways of how assets were lost include:

1. June 2011 - Hacker gets access to Mt. Gox server using an admin-level account stealing 2,000 bitcoins. It impacted bitcoin crashing from $17 - $0.01
2. October 2011 - 2,609 bitcoin was sent to non existent addresses by Mark Karpelès, Mt. Gox CEO.
3. At a certain point, 30,000 bitcoins were logged as deposits to customers while in fact being stolen by hackers.
4. Two bots, Markus and Willy, which operated on Mt. Gox mysteriously lost 22,800 bitcoins.

There is not a definite number to how much Mt. Gox really lost. It is estimated to be between 650k - 880k. If it would have been 2024, it would have easily scooped the biggest theft award. Only 200,000 bitcoins were recovered. The exchange was shut down in 2014 after filing for bankruptcy.

Wormhole 2022 - $326m

Wormhole describes itself as the #1 ranked cross chain messaging platform that allows developers to build decentralized applications that span the entire blockchain. But February 2022, this ranking was doubted by many users after a hacker got away with 120,000 ETH wrapped in Solana after exploiting a weakness on the wormhole liquidity bridge linking Solana and Ethereum.
The silver lining of this particular case was that a year later on February 2023, Jump Crypto and the Oasis App successfully executed a "counter heist" which recovered $225 from the hacker.
Since the attack, Wormhole has established a reward fund of $2.5m to encourage white-hat hackers to identify and submit potential vulnerabilities on the network.

KuCoin 2018 - $285m

Kucoin describes itself as the most trusted and secure trading platform for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the world with the mission to “facilitate the global free flow of digital value. It is ranked #7 globally in terms of trading volume. It boasts of $1.2 trillion in lifetime trading volume and over 30 million users worldwide.
But even the biggest exchanges are known to be brought to their knees by hackers. It's usually a race of technologies of encryption and decryption. Come September 25 2022, hackers finally caught up with the exchange causing a major security breach. The stolen funds included:

• 1,0008 Bitcoins
• 11,543 Ethereum
• 19,834,042 USDT-ETH
• 26,733 Litecoin
• 999,160 USDT
• $147m worth of erc-20 tokens
• $87m of stellar tokens

The hackers immediately transferred the assets to different exchanges. Tether and Bitfinex were swift to trace and freeze a considerable amount of the stolen assets. Subsequently customer losses were covered by an insurance fund.
The top exchange was again attacked on April 2023 when hackers infiltrated Kucoin's Twitter account and ran a scam giveaway. Even though only their twitter was compromised this time, the hackers made away with $22,600 worth of USDT.

Bitmart 2021 - $196m

December 2021 saw hackers strike again, this time stealing private keys belonging to crypto exchange website Bitmart, making away with various assets on the Ethereum blockchain worth $100m and more on the Binance chain equivalent to $96m. The hackers then swapped the tokens to Ether using DeX aggregator 1Inch before sending the Ether to a privacy mixer Tornado Cash to clear traces.

BitGrail 2018 - $170m

Theft of 17 million of Nano's XRB token apparently occurred just a month after the Coincheck heist. However, many argue that this was an inside job and pre-planned months before it was publicly announced. Before the attack, users raised concerns about funds movement restrictions. Withdrawal limits were lowered from 10 BTC to 1 BTC, adding to suspicions of an exit scam.