Deribit Hack

REPORTED LOSS $28.0M
High Private Key Compromised (Unknown Method)

What happened

On November 1, 2022, Deribit's hot wallet was compromised and approximately $28 million in BTC, ETH and USDC was stolen. Deribit said client accounts, cold storage, its insurance fund and trading platform were not affected, and that company reserves covered the loss.

Technical Root Cause

A compromised hot-wallet control path permitted unauthorized withdrawals; the exact compromise mechanism was not disclosed. Deribit's later manual approval requirement reduced the blast radius of a single automated wallet path.

Case & protocol details

Classification Infrastructure / Key Compromise / CeFi
Protocol Type CEX
Official Website www.deribit.com/
Protocol Twitter/X @deribitexchange

How it happened

  1. An attacker gained control of a Deribit hot-wallet signing path and moved BTC, ETH and USDC.
  2. The assets were later converted to ETH and began moving toward mixers.
  3. Deribit locked withdrawals and migrated hot-wallet operations to Fireblocks.
  4. It added manual confirmation for every withdrawal; the initial forensic entry point was not published.

Evidence & learning

Attack pattern

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Sources and on-chain records

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