Deribit Hack
Reported loss
$28.0M
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.
How it happened
- An attacker gained control of a Deribit hot-wallet signing path and moved BTC, ETH and USDC.
- The assets were later converted to ETH and began moving toward mixers.
- Deribit locked withdrawals and migrated hot-wallet operations to Fireblocks.
- It added manual confirmation for every withdrawal; the initial forensic entry point was not published.
Protocol details
Classification
Infrastructure / Key Compromise / CeFi
Protocol Type
CEX
Protocol links
Website
@deribitexchange
Evidence
- report @DeribitExchange incident report twitter.com
- report @PeckShieldAlert incident report twitter.com
- report Deribit: 1 November incident report and next steps insights.deribit.com
- analysis Website reference coindesk.com
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis Deribit custody policy support.deribit.com
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