Mt. Gox

What happened

Once the exchange handling the large majority of the world's Bitcoin trades, Mt. Gox abruptly halted withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy in Japan after disclosing that hundreds of thousands of customer and company bitcoins were gone — later attributed to theft that went undetected for years.

What to take from it

Trading volume and market dominance are not safety signals. An exchange can look like the industry's center of gravity and still be hollowed out inside.

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