The Biggest Crypto Hacks: A Timeline of Disasters and the Lessons Learned

The history of cryptocurrency is also marked by hacks: each record-breaking incident changed the rules of the game.

Timeline of Records

• Mt. Gox (2014): ~850,000 BTC. The monopoly exchange collapsed, giving rise to the golden rule “not your keys” and a decade-long saga of creditor repayments.
• The DAO (2016): ~$60 million in Ether via a reentrancy exploit-and a hard fork that split Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The question “Is code law?” received a practical answer.
• Ronin (2022): ~$620 million from the Axie bridge: social engineering against validators. The emergence of Lazarus as a major player and bridges as the primary target.
• FTX (2022): Not a hack, but the misappropriation of client funds by insiders-yet, in terms of consequences, the biggest “theft” of the cycle.
• Bybit (2025): ~$1.5 billion in ETH-the largest hack in history: compromise of the cold wallet signing process. The exchange survived by plugging the hole-a lesson on the importance of a sufficient reserve.

Cross-cutting lessons

Attack vectors are shifting from code to people: modern mega-thefts involve phishing for signers and interface spoofing, not clever bugs. Centralized wallets of any size remain the primary target. And the only constant: after every disaster, the industry becomes more paranoid-and more resilient. Current incidents are covered in this section.