158 crypto failures researched
Crypto startups die.
Ideas don't.
Every failed crypto startup is a lesson for founders.
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Directory
Featured Companies
158 companies found
FTX
The exchange built on borrowed customer money.
Terra / LUNA
An algorithmic dollar that couldn't hold a dollar.
Celsius Network
'Unbank yourself' — then they froze the bank.
Three Arrows Capital
A $10B fund that was long everything with everyone's money.
Mt. Gox
Once 70% of all Bitcoin traffic. Then it vanished.
BitConnect
A 'trading bot' that only ever printed new investors.
QuadrigaCX
The CEO died — and took the only keys with him.
The DAO
The $150M smart contract that forked Ethereum in two.
BlockFi
Crypto interest accounts, bailed out then buried by FTX.
Iron Finance
Crypto's first true bank run — live, on-chain.
Voyager Digital
A public brokerage with a private 3AC-sized hole.
Squid Game Token
You could buy, but the contract wouldn't let you sell.
OneCoin
A 'cryptocurrency' with no blockchain, sold by the missing Cryptoqueen.
PlusToken
A 'high-yield wallet' that became one of crypto's largest Ponzi schemes.
Diem (Libra)
Meta's global stablecoin, regulated into oblivion before launch.
Telegram TON (GRAM)
A $1.7B token sale halted by the SEC before it could launch.
Genesis Global Capital
The crypto lender that froze withdrawals after contagion hit its book.
Gemini Earn
A yield program that froze customer funds when its lending partner failed.
Wonderland
A high-yield DeFi treasury undone by a treasurer's hidden criminal past.
Ronin Bridge
Axie Infinity's bridge drained for ~$625M via stolen validator keys.
Wormhole Bridge
A Solana-Ethereum bridge exploited for ~$325M in minted wETH.
Nomad Bridge
A bug turned a bridge into a free-for-all, drained of ~$190M by a crowd.
Poly Network
A $600M cross-chain hack where the thief gave it all back.
Cream Finance
Repeatedly drained by flash-loan attacks, including a ~$130M hit.
Beanstalk Farms
A governance flash-loan attack stole ~$182M in seconds.
Thodex
A Turkish exchange whose CEO vanished with users' funds overnight.
Africrypt
South African brothers disappeared with a reported Bitcoin fortune.
Cred
An early crypto lender felled by fraud and bad bets, freezing accounts.
Vauld
A Singapore crypto lender that froze withdrawals in the 2022 contagion.
Prime Trust
A crypto custody backend that lost access to its own wallets.
Centra Tech
An ICO selling a crypto debit card backed by partnerships that didn't exist.
Frosties
An NFT mint whose creators vanished hours after selling out.
Pixelmon
A $70M NFT game that revealed laughably broken art.
WazirX
India's largest crypto exchange, gutted by a $235M multisig heist.
DMM Bitcoin
A Japanese exchange hit by one of 2024's largest crypto thefts.
Orbit Bridge
A Korean cross-chain bridge drained for $81M on New Year's Eve.
Radiant Capital
A lending protocol re-hacked via compromised hardware wallets.
Penpie
A Pendle yield-aggregator robbed by a fake market.
Qredo
An institutional custodian that entered UK administration.
Hawk Tuah ($HAWK)
A viral meme girl's token that crashed 91% in hours.
Bybit
The largest crypto theft in history — $1.5B gone in one signature.
Garantex
Russia's favourite dirty crypto laundry — seized by global law enforcement.
$LIBRA
Argentina's president tweeted a memecoin, then deleted the tweet.
MANTRA
An RWA darling that lost $5.4B in market cap over a weekend.
Stream Finance
CeDeFi yield that turned out to be an opaque $93M hole.
Elixir
A stablecoin killed by lending 65% of its reserves to Stream.
THORChain
A cross-chain DEX paused for five weeks after a $10.7M vault exploit.
Bit.com
Matrixport's derivatives exchange scheduled its own funeral.
Coincheck
$534M in NEM walked out of a hot wallet with no multisig.
Multichain
A top cross-chain bridge whose CEO held the keys — then vanished.
Harmony Horizon Bridge
A 2-of-5 multisig was all that guarded $100M — Lazarus took it.
Mango Markets
$115M drained by an oracle pump the attacker called 'legal'.
Euler Finance
A $197M flash-loan exploit — then the hacker gave it all back.
Mixin Network
A cloud database breach cost a cross-chain network ~$200M.
BitGrail
An Italian exchange lost ~17M NANO and blamed everyone but itself.
Vulcan Forged
A Web3 game studio lost $140M when its custodial wallets leaked.
Badger DAO
The smart contracts were fine — the website was the exploit.
SafeMoon
A 'safe' token whose locked liquidity wasn't actually locked.
CryptoZoo
Logan Paul's 'fun game that makes you money' that never shipped.
HyperVerse
A $1.3B Ponzi fronted by a CEO who didn't exist.
Tornado Cash
The privacy mixer the US Treasury added to its sanctions list.
Babel Finance
A Hong Kong lender that bet customer funds and lost ~$280M.
Hodlnaut
A Singapore yield platform sunk by its UST exposure.
LuBian
A bitcoin mining pool whose wallets were brute-forced for billions.
Balancer V2
A rounding flaw in stable pools cost it ~$128M across six chains.
Munchables
A Blast game drained for ~$62.5M by its own rogue developer.
Infini
A lingering dev privilege let an insider walk off with ~$49.5M.
Alpha Finance
A flash-loan attack on Alpha Homora drained ~$37.5M.
StableMagnet
A BSC stablecoin swap that drained contracts and wallets alike.
Bald
A viral Base memecoin whose deployer yanked ~$23M in liquidity.
Sonne Finance
An empty-market donation trick drained ~$20M on Optimism.
Curio
Inflated voting power let an attacker mint and drain ~$16M.
DEUS Finance
A flash-loan oracle attack on Fantom drained ~$13.4M.
PrismaLST
Trove manipulation via flash loan cost it ~$11.6M.
Arbix Finance
An audited BSC yield farm that drained its own contracts.
Silvergate Bank
Crypto's main banking rail, killed by a post-FTX deposit run.
BitClub Network
A $722M fake-mining MLM dressed up as a bitcoin pool.
Evolved Apes
'Evil Ape' minted out, then vanished with the treasury.
Sirin Labs (FINNEY)
A $158M ICO for a blockchain phone almost nobody bought.
Cetus CLMM
A spoofed token tricked the math into minting fake liquidity.
Poloniex
Hot wallets emptied across three chains in one night.
Curve DEX
A compiler bug, not the contracts, opened the door.
Cashio
A fake collateral account minted an infinite stablecoin.
Vee Finance
An oracle that trusted one source, drained in days.
Paid Network
A privileged mint function turned the token to confetti.
Elephant Money
Flash loans bent the price; the treasury paid.
UwU Lend
An oracle priced a stablecoin wrong; lenders paid.
Indexed Finance
Index pools rebalanced into a flash-loan trap.
pNetwork
A spoofed event log convinced the bridge to release.
Yearn Finance
Old, misconfigured vaults bit back years later.
Dego Finance
One leaked key, three chains drained at once.
Signature Bank
A crypto banking lifeline seized over a single weekend.
AirBit Club
A crypto MLM whose returns were pure fiction.
Save the Kids
A charity token rigged so insiders could dump.
Prodeum
An ICO for fruit on the blockchain that left only a slur.
BitMart
A hot-wallet key leak drained nearly $200M overnight.
Atomic Wallet
A self-custody wallet whose users woke up empty.
AnubisDAO
A dog-coin DAO that raised millions and vanished in hours.
KyberSwap Elastic
A concentrated-liquidity DEX undone by its own tick math.
Crypto.com
Withdrawals slipped past 2FA in a quiet January breach.
ThalaSwap
An Aptos DEX whose pools were drained, then handed back.
Pando Rings
An oracle nudge let a lender pay out far too much.
Pickle Finance
A yield aggregator tricked by a fake jar.
Team Finance
The liquidity locker that couldn't lock itself.
Abracadabra ($SPELL)
The magic ran out for the MIM money market again.
UXLINK
A delegatecall slip handed the keys to the attacker.
Zipmex
Contagion from Babel and Celsius froze its withdrawals.
JPEX
Billboards everywhere, then the withdrawals stopped.
Mining Capital Coin
Phantom mining rigs and trading bots that never existed.
Waves / Vires (USDN)
An algo-stablecoin propped up by its own reflexive loop.
Confido
A smart-contract escrow startup that escrowed nothing.
Wintermute
A vanity address gambled away ~$160M to a brute-force attacker.
Mirror Protocol
A duplicate-call bug let the same deposit be unlocked again and again.
EasyFi
A compromised admin key cost the lending protocol ~$59M.
PancakeBunny
A flash loan minted billions of BUNNY and crashed the token.
Meerkat Finance
A 'contract upgrade' that quietly redirected vaults to the deployer.
Harvest Finance
A flash loan bent Curve prices and farmed ~$25M from the vaults.
Blizz Finance
A frozen Chainlink feed let bad debt drain ~$21.8M.
Rhea Lend
Fake collateral drained ~$18.4M — then the attacker returned it all.
Inverse Finance Frontier
A manipulated TWAP let attackers over-borrow ~$15.6M.
Polter Finance
A flash-loan oracle attack wiped out ~$12M on Fantom.
Saddle Finance
A swap-math flaw let a flash loan extract ~$11M.
AAX
A 'system upgrade' that turned into a vanishing act.
Bittrex
An early US giant ground down by regulators into Chapter 11.
Pincoin / iFan
Vietnam's biggest ICO Ponzi paid out in worthless tokens.
Fei Protocol
An algorithmic stablecoin that broke peg on day one.
Veritaseum
An ICO the SEC called fraud, with manipulated trading.
Parity Multisig
A wallet library anyone could become owner of, then kill.
Qubit
Minted infinite collateral from a deposit that never happened.
Uranium Finance
A migration typo handed an attacker the whole pool.
KuCoin
Hot wallet keys leaked, then the exchange clawed it back.
MonoX
Sold a token to itself to pump its own price.
dForce Lending
An ERC-777 callback drained the pool, then the hacker returned it.
DEXX
A trading bot that stored users' private keys in the open.
Snowdog
An eight-day OHM fork that 'rebased to riches,' then collapsed.
Eminence
Money poured into an unfinished contract, then a flash loan took it.
Cork V1
A malicious hook walked past the access control.
ValueDefi
Hit repeatedly, ironically after an 'are you brave enough?' taunt.
CoinFLEX / OPNX
Imploded over one whale's debt, then rose as a claims casino.
Cryptopia
A hack it never recovered from, plus a fight over who owned the coins.
GainBitcoin
10% monthly bitcoin returns, until the mining was a Ponzi.
Basis Cash
Resurrected a dead stablecoin design that died the same way.
LBRY
Built a censorship-resistant content network, killed by the SEC.
Compound V2
A reward-math bug handed out ~$147M in free COMP.
Rari Capital
Drained repeatedly via reentrancy, the worst hit ~$80M.
Ooki
A phished private key cost the protocol ~$55M.
Hedgey
A flawed claim contract leaked ~$44.7M to attackers.
Spartan
Bad pool-share math leaked ~$30.5M on BSC.
xToken
A manipulated price oracle drained ~$24M.
Popsicle Finance
A rewards-accounting flaw melted ~$20M away.
BearnFi
A broken withdraw path bled ~$18M on BSC.
Furucombo
A delegatecall flaw let an attacker impersonate the protocol for ~$14M.
Compounder Finance
Devs swapped in malicious contracts and drained ~$12M.
Blend Pools V2
A manipulated oracle siphoned ~$11M on Stellar.
Orthogonal Trading
A borrower hid FTX losses and defaulted on its loans.
Forsage
A 'smart-contract' MLM that was a $300M+ Ponzi.
EthereumMax
Celebrity-hyped token that cratered ~98% after launch.
Acala (aUSD)
A misconfig minted billions of stablecoins for free.