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KripZen

Binance

Failure type
Hack
Date
May 2019
Reported loss
~7,000 BTC (~$40M at the time) taken from a hot wallet (publicly reported estimate)

What happened

On 7 May 2019 attackers withdrew roughly 7,000 BTC — about $40 million at the time — from a Binance hot wallet in a single transaction, using stolen API keys and phished credentials. Binance covered the entire loss from its Secure Asset Fund for Users, and customer balances were left untouched.

What to take from it

A reserve funded before a breach turns a hack into an accounting entry rather than a customer loss. Check that the fund exists and is disclosed today, not that one is promised afterwards.

Dates and figures are widely reported public estimates from coverage at the time, not KripZen's own audited data.

Where it sits on the record

The documented exchange failures we track, in the order they happened.

  1. 2014Mt. Gox
  2. 2015Bitstamp
  3. 2016Bitfinex
  4. 2016The DAO
  5. 2017Parity Multisig Wallet Freeze
  6. 2018BitConnect
  7. 2018Coincheck
  8. 2019Binance (You are here)
  9. 2019Bitfinex / Crypto Capital
  10. 2019QuadrigaCX
  11. 2020KuCoin
  12. 2022Celsius Network
  13. 2022Crypto.com
  14. 2022FTX
  15. 2022Ronin Bridge
  16. 2022Terra / LUNA
  17. 2022Three Arrows Capital
  18. 2022Wormhole
  19. 2023HTX (formerly Huobi)
  20. 2024DMM Bitcoin
  21. 2025Bybit