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KripZen

Bitstamp

Failure type
Hack
Date
January 2015
Reported loss
~19,000 BTC taken from hot wallets (publicly reported estimate)

What happened

In January 2015 roughly 19,000 BTC was taken from Bitstamp's hot wallets following a targeted attack on exchange staff. Bitstamp suspended trading, rebuilt its infrastructure, and afterwards moved to third-party institutional custody with the large majority of customer assets held offline.

What to take from it

What changed Bitstamp's risk profile was the rebuilt custody model, not the apology. Judge an exchange by what it did after an incident, not by how quickly it published a statement.

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 (You are here)
  3. 2016Bitfinex
  4. 2016The DAO
  5. 2017Parity Multisig Wallet Freeze
  6. 2018BitConnect
  7. 2018Coincheck
  8. 2019Binance
  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