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Top 10 Crypto Hack Losses by Incident and Root Cause

ByMaria PagkalinawanMaria Pagkalinawan 4 mins read

Binance lost control of roughly $6.3B in one evening, and its early findings point to a single engineer’s laptop rather than a smart-contract bug. The three weeks around it show the same pattern: a tampered hardware wallet supply chain, a breached cloud host, stale exchange wallets, and two prediction markets drained through third-party web scripts. If you hold funds on Binance or CoinDCX, bought a Ledger through CryptoBilis, stored keys on Railway, or traded on Polymarket or Predict.fun, the action steps below are for you.

MetricNumber 
Total plotted, 13 incidents About $6.4B (sum of low-end figures) 
Excluding Binance About $120M 
Binance share of total About 98% 
Keys, infrastructure and supply chain, excluding Binance About 91% of dollars (8 of 13 incidents) 

 Binance accounts for about 98% of the total 

Binance’s own estimate of $6.3B dwarfs every other incident. The log scale keeps the smaller incidents readable, so compare bar lengths with care: each gridline is ten times the one before it. 

Figure 1. Losses by incident, log scale. Color shows root cause (our classification). 

Ledger and CoinDCX make up about 85% of the rest 

Without Binance, the picture is a long tail. Ledger and CryptoBilis (an investigator’s estimate) and CoinDCX together account for about 85% of the remaining $120M, and no other incident passed $5M. 

Figure 2. Losses excluding Binance, linear scale. 

Infrastructure failures drive about 91% of non-Binance losses 

Adding Polymarket (about $2.5M, traced) moved the keys, infrastructure, and supply-chain share from 90.5% to 90.7%. Code and logic flaws account for about 5%, and governance for about 4%. 

Figure 3. Share of losses by root cause, excluding Binance. 

Full Incident Table 

Date Target Loss What Broke Status 
Oct 2 (catch-up) Aave v3 Loop Safe Module About 114 ETH Safe module compromised across two multisig wallets Flagged by SlowMist 
Oct 9 to 13 Ledger / CryptoBilis About $86M (est. $72M to $93M) Hardware implant in reseller-sold devices captured recovery phrases Reseller halted sales; recent buyers told not to begin setup 
Oct 10 Papertrade (Hyperliquid) About $1.28M Spot price manipulation Limited public detail 
Oct 13 Gamdom $3M to $4.2M Hot wallet reached after an outsider tied into one of its servers Whitearmor claims 15.4M account records and demands $15M; Gamdom disputes the size 
Oct 16 Affluent (TON) About $1.05M Unbacked mint Limited public detail 
Oct 17 Cysic bridge About $727K extracted (10M CYS minted) Database access plus a message-processing flaw Bridge suspended pending external review 
Oct 18 Qubic About $1.4M Predictable wallet seeds drained 1,404 accounts Restarted Oct 19; claims open until May 1, 2027 
Oct 20 to 22 Railway (cloud host) About $371K in linked thefts Build-system breach exposed stored secrets Rotate every stored key 
Oct 21 CoinDCX About $16M Old wallets from a 2025 breach drained after a sweeping service failed Exchange absorbs the loss; Tether froze $2.2M USDT 
Oct 21 to 23 Swell None confirmed (about 2,500 ETH flagged at risk) Suspected hot or admin key compromise swETH and rswETH paused; no ETH has left the contracts 
Oct 21 Fearless Wallet extension 17,286 DOT (about $20K) reported Four extension versions sent private keys to an attacker’s server Move funds to new keys 
Oct 23 Initia About $2.6M to $2.7M Software flaw let the attacker create unbacked balances Main chain and rollups paused as of Oct 24 
Oct 24 X100 About $4.85M Flash loan captured governance; no timelock between approval and execution Token down over 96% 
Oct 25 and 28 Yapeswap, Hifi Finance $21.9K; not quantified Malicious governance proposals Limited public detail 
Oct 27 Predict.fun About $400K USDT (29 wallets) Compromised third-party API docs site injected a drainer script Full reimbursement promised; docs site offline 
Oct 29 Polymarket About $2.5M (unconfirmed) Compromised vendor script (DebugBear) drained user wallets Trading resumed after about an hour; traders to be reimbursed; UK police referral 
Oct 29 Binance About $6.3B (est.) Compromised DevOps laptop, unauthorized withdrawals About $3B frozen; withdrawals paused 

Watchlist, next 14 days 

  • Binance: Withdrawal resumption, a full investigation, and an updated Proof of Reserves once remediation is done. 
  • Polymarket and DebugBear: A confirmed loss figure, reimbursement timing, and a root-cause account of how the script was altered. 
  • Ledger and CryptoBilis: A confirmed loss total and when reseller sales restart. 
  • Swell: No timeline has been given for resuming withdrawals. 
  • Initia: The fix and audit were estimated to take several days. 
  • Cysic: The attacker moved most of the ETH into Tornado Cash on Oct 23. The bridge stays offline until its review finishes. 
  • Predict.fun: Full post-mortem after the investigation concludes.

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