The majority of the time, money is put online, making it simpler for hackers to take virtual money than real money. Also, the ability to move anonymously large amounts of crypto has resulted in significant crypto heists. In this article, let's look at the top crypto heists of all time. Cryptocurrency exchanges continue to be breached.
The attack on Ronin Network in March 2022, which allowed users of the video game Axie Infinity to trade in-game tokens for other cryptocurrencies, was the largest crypto heist ever, according to a calculation based on the worth of the stolen crypto assets at the time they were taken.
The US$611 million heist from Poly Network last year, a platform for smart contracts that enables users to trade tokens between other blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, is the second-largest cryptocurrency heist in history.
A US$547 million theft of the obscure cryptocurrency NEM was disclosed by the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck in January 2018. The business acknowledged that it had kept the money in what is known as a "hot wallet," which is a bitcoin storage facility that is linked to the internet and hence susceptible to cybersecurity attacks.
The 2014 loss of US$480 million in Bitcoin from Mt. Gox, a different Japanese exchange, was the first widely reported and maybe still the most well-known crypto robbery. Mt. Gox, which was established in 2010 as a marketplace for exchanging "Magic the Gathering" game cards, was handling more than 70% of all Bitcoin transactions by 2014. It unexpectedly stopped trading, shut down its exchange services, and applied for bankruptcy protection in February of that year.
In September 2020, the Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin disclosed that US$275 million worth of cryptocurrency, including US$127 million in ERC20 tokens used in Ethereum smart contracts, had been stolen. The exchange's CEO, Johnny Lyu, disclosed that hackers had gained the private keys to its "hot wallets."
In a couple of hours in August 2022, the cross-chain protocol Nomad Token Bridge was depleted of US$190 million in several cryptocurrencies. Hackers may transfer any amount by simply altering the code of an earlier transaction since a flaw was introduced to the protocol during a regular upgrade.
A smaller Italian cryptocurrency exchange called BitGrail disclosed that hackers had stolen US$170 million in the specialized cryptocurrency Nano just a few weeks after the Coincheck incident. One Reddit user said that the breach cost them US$1.4 million. Because it was unable to pay its clients back, the exchange closed.
Beginning in early June 2022, the decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Maiar alerted customers about "strange behaviors" on its Elrond blockchain. Soon later, it was discovered by an unbiased researcher that hackers had discovered a platform security hole and exploited it to steal 1,650,000 Elrond eGold (EGLD), the blockchain's internal currency. At the time of the hack, it was valued at US$113 million. Nevertheless, the price of EGLD dropped from US$76 to barely US$5 when the hackers sold a little under half of their loot.
120,000 Bitcoin, worth US$72 million at the time, were taken from the Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016. As a result of the event, which saw the money from 2,000 transactions diverted into a single wallet under the control of the hackers, the price of Bitcoin fell by 20%. Although the money was not recovered at the time, the US Department of Justice stated last month that it had recovered the profits of the robbery, which are now valued at US$3.6 billion due to Bitcoin's skyrocketing price.
In 2017, a hack of cryptocurrency mining marketplace NiceHash resulted in the theft of little under 4,700 Bitcoin, which was valued at US$64m at the time. To steal Bitcoin, hackers broke into the website's payment system.
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