Case Studies

Attribution: Lazarus Group

On February 21, 2025, Bybit suffered the largest crypto hack in history. Attackers — later attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group — compromised Bybit's Ethereum cold wallet via a malicious multisig transaction, draining approximately $1.5 billion in ETH and stETH. The funds were immediately split across dozens of wallets and routed through mixers to obscure the trail.

Attribution: Lazarus Group

On March 23, 2022, Lazarus Group executed the second-largest crypto theft in history by compromising the Ronin bridge — the sidechain powering Axie Infinity. Through a spear-phishing attack disguised as a fake job offer, attackers obtained private keys to 5 of 9 Ronin validator nodes, granting them unilateral withdrawal authority. Two fraudulent transactions drained 173,600 ETH and 25.5M USDC from the bridge contract. The breach went undetected for six days until a user reported an inability to withdraw funds. US Treasury attributed the attack to Lazarus Group in May 2022 and sanctioned the exploiter address.

Attribution: Lazarus Group

On October 16, 2024, Radiant Capital lost $50M in one of DeFi's most sophisticated supply-chain attacks. Three senior developers received a malware-laced PDF disguised as a smart contract audit — malware silently compromised their hardware wallets. When the developers signed what appeared to be routine multi-sig transactions, the malware invisibly altered the calldata, transferring ownership of Radiant's lending pool contracts to the attacker. $18M was drained from Arbitrum, $32M from BNB Chain. Google's Mandiant later confirmed the attack was carried out by Lazarus Group.

Attribution: Unknown (funds returned)

On March 13, 2023, Euler Finance — a permissionless lending protocol on Ethereum — suffered the largest DeFi hack of 2023 at the time: $197M drained via a sophisticated flash loan re-entrancy exploit. The attacker weaponized a flaw in Euler's donation mechanism (`donateToReserves`) that bypassed the health-check guard, allowing a single transaction to simultaneously hold massive debt and trigger liquidations against their own position. The hack was notable for its unexpected resolution: after failed negotiations and an on-chain ultimatum, the attacker returned $177M — keeping only ~$20M — making it one of the few DeFi exploits with a partial recovery.

Attribution: Lazarus Group (suspected)

In the final hours of 2023 (23:00 UTC, December 31), Orbit Bridge — a cross-chain bridge operated by the Ozys team — was drained of $82M across five transactions. The attacker targeted USDT, USDC, DAI, WBTC, and ETH reserves held on Ethereum, routing funds simultaneously to BSC and Polygon. The exploit is believed to have leveraged a compromised multi-sig key or a rogue insider; on-chain evidence showed the attacker bypassed the bridge's 7-of-10 multi-sig by forging signatures, or accessing signer keys. Blockchain security firm Theori and Ozys attributed the attack to Lazarus Group based on TTPs and fund-flow patterns. Approximately $82M remains unrecovered.

Attribution: Lazarus Group

On July 18, 2024, India's largest crypto exchange WazirX lost $235M — roughly 45% of its total reserves — in a sophisticated multi-signature wallet attack. Attackers, suspected to be Lazarus Group, exploited a discrepancy between the transaction data displayed in the Liminal custody UI and the actual on-chain calldata. WazirX co-signers unknowingly approved a transaction that upgraded their Safe multisig contract to a malicious implementation, granting the attacker full control. Over $235M in 16+ token types — including SHIB, ETH, MATIC, and USDT — was drained and routed through Tornado Cash.

Attribution: Unknown (300+ copycats)

On August 1, 2022, Nomad Bridge — a cross-chain messaging protocol — was drained of $190M in the most chaotic exploit in DeFi history. Unlike typical hacks orchestrated by a single attacker, a critical bug in Nomad's Replica contract allowed anyone to forge fraudulent withdrawal messages with zero cryptographic knowledge. Once the initial exploiter discovered the flaw, the transaction was visible on-chain and hundreds of opportunistic copycats simply copy-pasted the calldata — replacing the recipient address — and replicated the drain. Over 300 addresses participated, extracting funds over several hours before Nomad could pause the bridge.

Attribution: Insider (CEO arrested)

On July 6, 2023, Multichain — one of the largest cross-chain bridge protocols with over $1.5B TVL at peak — experienced abnormal outflows of $126M across Fantom, Moonriver, and Dogecoin chains. What initially appeared to be a hack was later revealed to be far more disturbing: Multichain's CEO, Zhaojun He, had been arrested by Chinese authorities in May 2023, taking sole custody of all MPC (multi-party computation) server keys. His sister and other team members subsequently moved funds in an attempt to recover them — actions that appeared indistinguishable from a rug pull to the outside world. The Multichain protocol was officially shut down in July 2023.

Attribution: Avraham Eisenberg (arrested)

On October 11, 2022, Mango Markets — a decentralized trading platform on Solana — lost $116M in one of the most brazen and legally unprecedented DeFi exploits. Trader and self-described 'applied game theorist' Avraham Eisenberg openly admitted to and planned the attack: he artificially pumped the price of Mango's native MNGO token by 10× using two accounts he controlled, inflated his collateral value to $423M on paper, and borrowed all available liquidity from the protocol. He then negotiated a $47M governance-approved settlement — framing it as a 'whitehat' rescue — before being arrested by the FBI in December 2022 and convicted in April 2024.

On January 8, 2026, Truebit — a verification protocol on Ethereum — was drained of $26.4M. The proceeds were consolidated into a single attacker-controlled wallet and then aggressively fragmented, and ChainHint's trace follows them to where they came to rest: DeFi swaps, a single exchange deposit address, and a larger group whose labels this page does not stand behind. Those labels are unverified and record no source, so the page names the endpoints and leaves them unnamed.

On February 11, 2025, zkLend — a lending protocol on Starknet — was exploited for $9.55M. The attacker seeded an empty lending market with a dust deposit, then manipulated the market's lending accumulator through repeated flash-loan-funded deposits and withdrawals, abusing rounding behavior to withdraw more than was ever deposited. The proceeds were bridged from Starknet to Ethereum mainnet. ChainHint holds no fund-flow trace of its own for this incident: the graph that once sat on this row was built against Ethereum mainnet rather than Starknet, and was cleared on 2026-09-16. zkLend publicly offered the attacker a whitehat deal to return 90% of the funds; no deal materialized. The case took a bizarre turn weeks later when the hacker claimed on-chain to have lost the bulk of the stolen ETH to a phishing website impersonating a mixer's frontend — thief phished by thieves.

Attribution: Individual hackers (arrested)

On February 16, 2023, Platypus Finance — a stableswap AMM on Avalanche — was exploited for $8.5M via a flash loan attack on its USP stablecoin. The attacker used flash-loaned USDC as collateral to mint USP, then abused a missing solvency check in the protocol's emergency withdrawal path to reclaim the collateral while keeping the minted debt outstanding. The aftermath was unusually favorable for victims: a significant portion of the stolen stablecoins was frozen or recovered with help from security researchers and stablecoin issuers, and within days French police arrested two suspects identified through on-chain analysis. The freezes cut the laundering routes short before much of the loot could move. A graph was re-traced onto this row on October 8, 2026, but its earliest traced movement falls months after the exploit rather than in the days around it, and nobody has yet established what it followed — so ChainHint states no count, no endpoint and no destination from it here.

Attribution: Whitehat-turned (funds returned)

On October 18, 2022, Moola Market — a lending protocol on Celo — lost $8.4M to a price manipulation attack on its own MOO governance token. The attacker exploited MOO's thin on-chain liquidity: aggressive spot buying pumped the token's price several-fold, inflating the value of MOO posted as collateral, which was then used to borrow CELO, cUSD, cEUR and additional MOO far beyond the collateral's real worth. Moola paused the protocol as the funds began to move. Hours later, following public negotiation, the attacker returned roughly 93% of the stolen assets and kept the remainder as a de facto bug bounty — converting one of Celo's largest exploits into a mostly-recovered incident. ChainHint holds no fund-flow trace of its own for this incident.

On February 15, 2026, Moonwell — a lending protocol operating on Base and Moonbeam — suffered an exploit resulting in approximately $1.78M in losses, reported by DeFiLlama as an oracle/liquidation-related incident. The graph this page used to show was built against Ethereum mainnet, not Base, and was cleared on 2026-09-16; a re-trace on October 8, 2026 put a new graph on this row, and not one transfer in it can be dated to the window of the incident it is filed under. ChainHint therefore states no count, no endpoint and no destination from it, and the loss figure and the classification above are DeFiLlama's.

On March 20, 2024, users of Dolomite were drained of approximately $1.8M — not through the live protocol, but through a deprecated Dolomite contract dating back to 2019. The old contract's callFunction mechanism could be abused to move tokens on behalf of any user who still had an active approval to it. Users who had interacted with Dolomite years earlier and never revoked those ancient allowances found their wallets drained on Ethereum mainnet, where the legacy contracts remained live; the current Arbitrum deployment was unaffected. The team publicly urged users to revoke approvals to the legacy contract. The case is a textbook reminder that token approvals are indefinite: a contract deprecated five years earlier remained a live attack surface. The graph that stood on this row until September 30, 2026 was built from an address public reporting does not name as the exploiter, and most of its transfers predated the theft, so it was withdrawn rather than relabelled; a re-trace on October 8, 2026 put a new one there, and its first traced movement falls on the day of the theft rather than weeks after it. This page still states no figure, no endpoint and no address of its own from that graph — the record here carries no attacker address for this incident, and everything above rests on public reporting alone.

On July 21, 2023, Conic Finance — an omnipool protocol built on the Curve ecosystem that spread deposits across multiple Curve pools — lost approximately $3.2M from its ETH omnipool. The attacker exploited a read-only reentrancy vulnerability: by re-entering during a Curve pool interaction, they manipulated the price the protocol's oracle read, and drained roughly 1,700 ETH in a single transaction. The hit came just days after a separate, smaller incident affecting one of Conic's Curve pools — a brutal one-two punch for the young protocol. ChainHint's trace of the exploiter's flow is short, and the strip above gives its exact size.

On November 8, 2023, CoinSpot — one of Australia's largest centralized exchanges — saw roughly $2.4M leave its hot wallets in what security researchers assessed as a private-key compromise. Two transactions, 1,262 ETH and 20.99 ETH, flowed to an attacker-controlled address; on-chain investigator ZachXBT was first to flag the movement and reported that the proceeds were swapped onward into Bitcoin. CoinSpot never officially confirmed a breach. ChainHint's own trace is an Ethereum-side trace, and it ends where the value leaves the observable EVM surface: every endpoint it reaches resolves as unknown, a textbook illustration of the "payment break" that severs a single-chain trail. Which service carried the value off Ethereum is not something this trace establishes — the one node in it that names one rests on a hand-entered label, so this page does not repeat the name.

On November 17, 2024, Polter Finance — a lending protocol on Fantom forked from Geist and Aave — was drained after an attacker used a flash loan to manipulate the spot price of the BOO token in the SpookySwap pool that Polter relied on as its price oracle. The flawed oracle valued a single BOO at roughly $1.37 trillion, letting the attacker borrow against wildly inflated collateral and empty the pools of FTM, USDC, sFTMX and MIM. Reported losses were about $8.7M on-chain and ~$12M per Polter's police report. The team froze the protocol, attempted an on-chain bounty negotiation that went unanswered, and ultimately shut the project down. The proceeds were bridged off Fantom. ChainHint holds no fund-flow trace of its own for this incident: Fantom is not among the chains our tracer supports, and the Ethereum-mainnet graph that used to sit on this row was cleared on 2026-09-16.

Attribution: Lazarus Group 🇰🇵

On September 12, 2023, hot wallets of the CoinEx exchange were drained across nine-plus chains for roughly $55M — an operation attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group. On Ethereum the flow ran through the address Etherscan labels "CoinEx Fund Drainer 2", from which ~6,558 ETH moved onward for laundering. ChainHint's trace follows the drainer as it fans the funds out through DEX swaps and ends at exchange deposit addresses among the terminals — custodial touchpoints where freeze requests are possible.

Attribution: Lazarus Group 🇰🇵

On September 20, 2024, the BingX exchange lost ~$43M from its hot wallets in a multichain drain attributed to Lazarus Group. At least ten exploiter addresses worked in parallel; the one ChainHint traces swapped drained tokens to ETH through Uniswap's Universal Router within the first hour and forwarded 283.95 ETH to the operation's primary consolidation wallet. Endpoint attribution resolved one exchange deposit address among the terminals: even a Lazarus-scale laundering run touches custodial services where freezes are possible.

On November 10, 2022, DFX Finance's V2 stablecoin pools were drained through a flash-loan exploit: the attacker borrowed pool liquidity, deposited it back as collateral and withdrew the pool's real assets before repaying the loan. In a twist that defined the incident, a front-running MEV bot spotted the attacker's pending transaction and replayed it first — netting more than the attacker did. ChainHint's trace maps both flows through Curve and Uniswap V3 pools; its largest single endpoint, on both the historical and the current valuation, is an address our labels carry as Tornado Cash.

On May 28, 2021, BurgerSwap — a BSC-based AMM — was drained of ~$7.2M in a flash-loan attack that abused a fake-token pair to manipulate reserves and re-enter the swap logic fourteen times in one transaction. ChainHint traces the attacker's address as the proceeds were swapped out through 1inch, the largest of the three endpoints this trace holds.

On July 30, 2021, Levyathan Finance on BSC was destroyed by one of DeFi's most avoidable failures: the team had committed the private key of the MasterChef contract owner to a public GitHub repository. An attacker used it to regain ownership through the timelock and mint 100 septillion LEV tokens, dumping them into the pools and crashing the token to zero. ChainHint's trace reaches one hop out of the attacker's address and stops there: five transfers into three PancakeSwap pairs and one two-asset swap pool, every one of them a contract the trace will not walk through. Where the proceeds went after those four contracts is not something this trace answers.

Attribution: OFAC-designated issuer wallets

A7A5 is a ruble-pegged, yield-rebasing stablecoin issued on TRON and Ethereum since January 2025. The EU prohibited any transaction involving it in the 19th sanctions package (Council Regulation (EU) 2025/2033, Article 5ba of Regulation (EU) No 833/2014, Annex LIII); OFAC designated its issuer-side wallets (Old Vector, Grinex, A7) on 14 August 2025. Re-measured on 23 September 2026: the TRON contract carried 45.85 B A7A5 (≈ $545 M at par) — 19 % more than the totalSupply() figure explorers print — and one vault held 87.6 % of it, down from 90.5 % three weeks earlier after 1.28 B moved to four unlabelled addresses. Of $136.3 B in raw turnover, $93 M is human-scale; and 14 of 32 key addresses are invisible to the OFAC list, the free Chainalysis oracle and ChainHint's own database alike. Exact round trips inside 24 hours account for 16.1 % of all turnover the asset has ever recorded.