Coincheck hack – the biggest crypto heist in history at the time it occurred in 2018 was an eye-opener for many reasons, not least of which for the way the stolen assets were being stored.  Seasoned crypto enthusiasts and early adopters of the disruptive new technology know now that safely storing your digital assets is half the battle, but it wasn’t always so. Insufficiently secured storage was the norm for almost a decade after Bitcoin’s creation, with many people simply keeping their crypto on centralized exchanges, hot wallets, or even just USB sticks without any password protection. With the $534M Coincheck hack in January of 2018, security and responsible self-custody of crypto assets quickly became a hot topic of discussion in the media and the crypto community. You’ll see why. The Full Story Behind the Coincheck Hack Coincheck is today one of Japan’s largest crypto exchanges, still trading 10’s of millions of dollars worth of crypto each day, denoted in Japanese Yen (JPY). At the time of the Coincheck hack, it was the largest crypto exchange in Japan, and the attack represented the largest crypto heist of all time in terms of US dollar amount, surpassing the hack of another...Read More

Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge Hack for $551M worth of crypto assets could paradoxically lead to higher rates of blockchain adoption by showing that it’s a lot easier to track stolen cryptocurrency than people think. The popular misconception that cryptocurrencies are private and untraceable fuels the equally popular misconception that it’s impossible to track and recover stolen crypto assets. In fact, even some of the most high-profile and sophisticated crypto theft operations have been exposed through the use of blockchain forensics and crypto investigations. The infiltration of Sky Mavis leading to the Axie Infinity Ronin bridge exploit and the subsequent postmortem is a perfect example. How Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge was Hacked In short, it was a phishing attack against employees at Sky Mavis that led to a successful 51% attack on the Ronin network, but let’s start at the beginning. Axie Infinity was at one time the world’s most popular play-to-earn blockchain game. It has its own layer 2 blockchain called Ronin, built on Ethereum. In order for users to transfer funds from the Ethereum blockchain to the Ronin blockchain, a bridge is required. This is what we’re referring to when we talk about the Ronin bridge. Bridges require sufficient...Read More

The full story behind the Wormhole bridge hack that led to the fraudulent minting of 120,000 wETH and threatened to crash Solana. Early February of 2022 was a low-point for the cryptocurrency asset class; one of many more to come throughout the year. The price of BTC was on a relentless downtrend from a high of $69,044.77 on Nov 10, 2021, to under $40,000 by February 02, 2022. This is the market atmosphere in which the $320M Wormhole bridge hack occurred. The Wormhole bridge exists to help users move their assets from one blockchain to another – most often from Ethereum to Solana. The bridge, like any other, requires that users deposit their assets from one chain, such as ETH for example, and then they get the equivalent in a “debt token” (wETH or wrapped ETH) on the chain they wish to bridge to. From there, they can use the wETH to interact with dApps (decentralized apps) or exchange it for other assets, such as SOL or USDC. The Wormhole bridge hack involved falsifying on-chain messages and transactions which allowed the attacker to steal the funds. How the Wormhole Bridge Hack was Executed By using a fake ‘sysvar’ account to...Read More

KuCoin Hack – When attacked, some crypto projects and exchanges buckle and fold under pressure; KuCoin, set the standard in 2020 for how to react to crypto hacks, even on the largest scale. KuCoin is a Singapore-based crypto exchange that consistently ranks among the top 5 exchanges in terms of daily volume serving the crypto markets in Asia. As of November 2022, they offer over 900 trading pairs of 700+ different cryptocurrencies, putting them firmly in the top 10 among both centralized and decentralized exchanges in terms of sheer amount of coins offered. On September 25, 2020, KuCoin suffered one of the biggest incidents of theft in human history, let alone the short lifespan of the cryptocurrency asset class. More than 150 different cryptocurrencies made up the loot, which were valued at roughly $285M at the time according to KuCoin’s CEO. You can imagine it’s difficult to calculate the precise value of the stolen digital assets because of the volatility of their varying prices, but it’s not impossible. In fact, blockchains record all the information required to calculate the exact value of the assets at the time of the hack; they also record all the information required to trace the...Read More

The full story behind the first major crypto hack – MtGox Hack – and how much really was lost. MtGox was one of the very first platforms on which people could buy, sell, and trade bitcoin. Launched in July 2010, by 2014 the Tokyo-based company was handling over 70% of all BTC transactions globally. It was on a trajectory that could have put it alongside or even in place of the major exchanges we know today, such as Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, etc. In fact, the domain name ‘mtgox.com’ was initially purchased in 2007 by the MtGox founder, Jed McCaleb, with the intention of building a Magic: The Gathering trading website where users could trade their MtG cards online like stocks (MtGox = Magic the Gathering Online Exchange); there’s no doubt they would have been early adopters of NFTs as well. The website was transitioned into one of the world’s first crypto exchanges after McCaleb read about bitcoin in an online publication called Slashdot and saw the opportunity to build a business. However, in early 2014, at the height of its operations and no longer in the hands of McCaleb (who sold in 2011 to French developer Mark Karpelès), everything ground...Read More

BitGrail Hack – Around $170M worth of cryptocurrency was allegedly stolen from an obscure Italian crypto exchange called BitGrail in 2018; it’s still unclear exactly how or by whom. Just weeks after Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck was hacked – an event dubbed “the biggest theft in the history of the world” at the time – the Italian crypto exchange BitGrail announced they were unable to account for millions of Nano (XNO), valued around $170M. Similar to the Coincheck hack, this incident involved BitGrail’s hot wallet allegedly being compromised. However, that’s where the similarities end. Coincheck was praised for taking full responsibility and returning 90% of stolen funds to affected users from their own capital just months after the attack, whereas it was nearly a year before the owner of BitGrail was ordered by Italian courts to face insolvency and attempt to repay what was lost by users of his exchange. The lesson we all learned was to do our due diligence when deciding on a crypto exchange to use. The BitGrail Hack Timeline February 08, 2018: BitGrail announces XRB markets are down (XRB is the former ticket of the NANO cryptocurrency, now XNO). No further information is provided. Source: https://twitter.com/BitGrail/status/961643213936300032?s=20&t=-l1G0Cv_bBWy7xzyhk-KnA...Read More