Crypto Case Studies
Structured post-mortems of the major exchange collapses, bridge exploits, smart-contract failures, governance attacks, and depegs. Each entry covers the timeline, the mechanism that caused the failure, operational lessons, and primary-source citations. Read them to internalise patterns that have repeated across the industry.
FTX Collapse
November 2022 — second-largest crypto exchange collapses in days; founder convicted of fraud and conspiracy.
Read the post-mortemTerraUSD (UST) & LUNA Collapse
May 2022 — algorithmic stablecoin death-spiral wipes out $40B+ across UST and LUNA in roughly 72 hours.
Read the post-mortemMt. Gox Collapse
February 2014 — at the time the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world goes bankrupt with ~850,000 BTC missing. Recovery proceedings continue a decade later.
Read the post-mortemThe DAO Hack
June 2016 — reentrancy exploit drains $60M from The DAO and triggers Ethereum's contentious hard fork that created ETH and ETC.
Read the post-mortemRonin Bridge Hack
March 2022 — North Korean state-sponsored attackers drain $625M from the Axie Infinity sidechain bridge. Largest crypto theft to date.
Read the post-mortemWormhole Bridge Exploit
February 2022 — $325M drained from Wormhole's Solana–Ethereum bridge via a signature-verification bug. Jump Crypto immediately backstopped the loss.
Read the post-mortem