Post-mortems of crypto exchange failures, from Mt.Gox to FTX
This archive covers the common ways newcomers lose money in crypto — picking the wrong exchange, trusting the wrong stablecoin, crossing the wrong bridge, signing the wrong contract, chasing a "guaranteed yield" promise. Each comes with cases: what happened, how much was lost, and what the public record says.
What is collected here are the major crypto events since 2010 — some ended in bankruptcy, some were thefts at venues that made users whole and still operate, and some were regulatory or macro shocks. Each is reconstructed from the public record: what went wrong, how much was lost, and whether there were signals in public beforehand.
Before the doors open, a few words.
In February 2018 a small Italian exchange called BitGrail stopped withdrawals. Its users could still see their NANO balances, but could never get them out. "It is right there in my account and I will never touch it again" — in crypto, that happens again and again.
These things deserve to be written down, one by one. How Mt.Gox actually failed. How Cryptopia's hot wallet was breached. Where QuadrigaCX's money actually went. How Luna lost its peg, step by step. If they were going to be written down, they might as well have a building of their own.
What this archive does: reconstruct major events that have already happened from the public record, one at a time, and set out the judgement calls worth keeping. The Verification Desk also checks exchange incidents that are still unfolding, and those pages state the date they were checked.
The archive does not take commissioned pieces. It takes part in Binance's referral programme, and that relationship is disclosed at the top of this page and in the footer.
—— Keeper Shen, May 15, 2026
Archive Index · Volume 1
Shipwreck Annals · Addendum · The full overview54 Major Crypto Events, 2010–2025: A Timeline of Exchange Failures, DeFi Hacks, Stablecoin De-pegs and Regulatory Shocks
The longest piece in the archive. From the 2010 CVE-2010-5139 value-overflow bug to the 2025 Bybit theft of about $1.5 billion — 54 major events in date order, each with the loss, the cause and the outcome, plus 12 lessons at the end.
Shipwreck Annals · Volume One AddendumMt.Gox Repayment Deadline Extended to 2027
With court permission, Mt.Gox's trustee moved the deadline for base, early lump-sum and intermediate repayments from Oct 31, 2026 to Oct 31, 2027 (Japan time).
Shipwreck Annals · Vol. VJPEX was on the SFC's suspicious list for over a year before trading stopped
The SFC put JPEX on its suspicious list in July 2022 and named it on Sept 13, 2023. Trading stopped Sept 18; on Sept 29 police described it as the fraud with the most victims and the largest losses in recent years.
Shipwreck Annals · Vol. IVQuadrigaCX: Behind the Founder's Death, the Other Answer a Regulator's Report Found
In 2019 the founder died in India and the platform stopped operating soon after, and the version that spread furthest was that the keys went with him. After ten months of review, the Ontario Securities Commission's answer was that most of the C$169 million shortfall came from the founder trading against clients with fake balances, and that in its later stages the platform ran like a Ponzi scheme.
Shipwreck Annals · Vol. IMt.Gox: The Forensic Timeline of 850,000 Lost Bitcoin, 2010–2024
From a Magic-the-Gathering card-trading site to the world's largest bitcoin exchange to a bankruptcy filing that is still distributing assets twelve years later. The strange thing about this shipwreck is that it is still paying out. This piece reconstructs the timeline year by year, from the 2010 launch to the first distributions in 2024 and where things stand in 2026, and explains why the case still matters today.
Shipwreck Annals · Vol. IIThe Terra/Luna Collapse, Day by Day: May 7 to May 13, 2022
Between May 9 and May 12, 2022, UST fell from $1 to about ten cents and LUNA fell from over $60 to almost nothing. Anchor's 19.5% yield, the 4Pool plan, LFG's last-stand 80,000 BTC — this piece reconstructs each step of that death spiral in order.
Shipwreck Annals · Vol. IIIFTX Collapse · 9 Days From $32B to Bankruptcy
November 2, 2022 — CoinDesk publishes the leaked Alameda balance sheet. November 11 — FTX files for bankruptcy. Nine days. This piece reconstructs them day by day — what happened and who said what — and follows the criminal trial and the customer repayments that came after.
Shipwreck Annals · Outer VolumePlusToken Wallet Scam · How a Multi-Billion-Dollar Ponzi Collapsed
A Ponzi scheme packed into a mobile wallet, sold as a high-yield "arbitrage" account, then inflated by multi-level referral commissions until, in a little over a year, it reached the more than 2.6 million members a court later counted. It stopped in June 2019. This volume covers how it rose, how it stopped, and what the court ruling and Chainalysis's on-chain analysis each found.
Archaeology · Lesson One"Never leave coins on an exchange" no longer applies to everyone
Old hands pass "Not your keys, not your coins" down by word of mouth — yet in recent years the losses from on-chain phishing, signature fraud and contract exploits have stopped being small enough to ignore. This lesson re-examines the rule: who should self-custody, who should use custody at a compliant exchange, and how to layer assets across three amount tiers.
Archaeology · Lesson TwoFrom Mt.Gox to FTX: Shared Warning Signs Before 8 Exchange and Lending-Platform Failures
Mt.Gox, Cryptopia, QuadrigaCX, FTX, Celsius, Voyager, BitGrail, Bitfinex 2016 — set these eight exchange and lending-platform incidents side by side and a handful of signals that were visible beforehand come out. This piece turns those signals into five criteria, each with a check you can run yourself.
Verification Desk · exchange checks and wallet scam watch
Verification Desk · Case 01BitForex: $56.5M left the hot wallets, the site went dark three days later
On February 23, 2024 the on-chain analyst ZachXBT flagged roughly $56.5 million leaving BitForex's hot wallets; three days later the site could not be reached. This file sets out the timeline against its sources: the Hong Kong SFC's warning of March 4, and the statement five months later in which BitForex said its team had been detained by police and that withdrawals would open.
Verification Desk · Case 02Can you still withdraw from Hotbit? The window closed June 21, 2023 — what you can do if you missed it
If you searched "can I still withdraw from Hotbit," here is the answer first: no. It announced its shutdown on May 22, 2023 and the withdrawal window closed on June 21. This file covers what the notice said, the August 2022 suspension that followed a criminal investigation into a former employee, and what is left for anyone who missed the window.
Verification Desk · Case 03Bitget reopened withdrawals in four batches after the Sept 25 attack
Bitget puts the amount affected by the Sept 25, 2026 (UTC+8) hot wallet attack at about $388 million and says its phased withdrawal plan was completed Oct 2.
Scam Watch · Wallet SecurityWhat to do when your wallet has been multisigged: the TRON TRX scam explained
One of the rare pieces here with no happy ending: once a wallet has been maliciously multisigged, it is essentially unrecoverable. So the weight sits on prevention — the two most common plays (the honeypot that hands you a stranger's private key, and the signature phishing that takes over your own wallet), why it cannot be undone, and how to cut losses without being farmed a second time by someone offering to "remove the multisig."
Safety tools · check it yourself
Finished the cases and want to act now? This tool turns the risk signals that keep recurring in the archive's cases into a tick-box checklist — no technical background needed; work through it and see how many your exchange hits.
Tool · Exchange self-checkExchange Safety Check: count the red flags
Eight risk signals to tick off one by one: withdrawals slowing or being paused, no verifiable proof of reserves, an anonymous team with no traceable licence, high-yield lock-up products, the platform's own token making up too much of its reserves, public reports of withdrawal problems, very few app-store reviewers, and support that only reaches you through private chats pushing deposits. The risk gauge on the page updates with each box.
Primers · core concepts
Primers · ConceptsWhat is proof of reserves (PoR)? Learning to verify a PoR report from scratch
PoR is the first of the five criteria in Archaeology Lesson Two. This is the from-zero explainer: what it solves and what it doesn't, how to tell a genuine report from a hollow one, and what a zk-SNARK adds on the liability side.
Primers · ConceptsSAFU explained: the address, the size, how many times it has actually been used, and the gap with FDIC
SAFU is the user protection fund Binance set up in July 2018. This piece checks, against the official FAQ, the two on-chain addresses it now publishes, how its size is described, and how many times it has really been drawn on, compares it with FDIC bank insurance, and explains why it is an extra buffer rather than an absolute backstop.
This archive's job is to help you avoid a few wrecks, not to talk you out of crypto.
The whole archive at a glance
One page straight to every piece — sorted by category, so you can jump to the ship, the lesson, or the check you care about most.
Shipwreck Annals Major events timeline · Mt.Gox · Mt.Gox repayment deadline · Luna's collapse · QuadrigaCX · JPEX and the SFC suspicious list · The Night of FTX · PlusToken Ponzi
Archaeology Lessons Lesson One · exchange or self-custody · Lesson Two · shared warning signs
Verification Desk · Scam Watch BitForex, start to finish · Hotbit: can you still withdraw? · Bitget withdrawals reopened · TRON multisig scam
Safety tools Exchange safety self-check
Primers What proof of reserves (PoR) is · What SAFU is, and what it does not cover
Referral Binance referral BN16188 explained
Visitor FAQ
The articles are not commissioned. The referral code near the top of this page is the archive's code in Binance's referral programme: you copy it and type it in yourself on the official sign-up page, and when someone registers and trades with it the archive may receive a referral fee. That relationship is disclosed at the top of this page, in the footer and in the affiliate disclosure. The site carries no referral links for any other exchange; Binance's own incidents (the 2019 hot-wallet theft and the 2022 BSC Token Hub attack) are entries 11 and 25 of the major events timeline.
Because an event can only be written accurately once it has happened and the record is in — bankruptcy filings, regulatory documents, statements from the parties. For rising projects the record is incomplete, so anything written is partly guesswork. The Verification Desk does check exchange incidents that are still unfolding; those pages state the date they were checked and stick to what has been officially published.
Every article ends with a "primary sources" list of the public material it used — court and regulatory documents, bankruptcy trustee reports, statements from the parties, press reports, and in some places Wikipedia entries. If you spot a mistake, email me ([email protected]); I'll publish a correction and credit you.
No. "Keeper Shen" is a pen name. I use it because I'd rather not tie my offline identity to these post-mortems. Every article is signed with it, and errors are corrected in public. A longer version of why I use a pen name and what I can talk about is on the About page.