加密史上五大亏损事件盘点

Crypto was supposed to give people control over their wealth, a way to transact across the globe, personto person, without governments, banks, or middlemen taking a cut or calling the shots. It was supposed to be about financial freedom. And then a parade of chancers, fraudsters, and the occasional just butterfingers showed up and turned a fair chunk of it into a cautionary tale. So today, we're walking through the five biggest losses in crypto history in the order they happened, how each one came about, and how you can avoid being part of the next one.

My name is Guy, and you're watching the Coin Bureau. Our story doesn't begin with a fraud, but with a binag. Back in 2009, when Bitcoin was a curiosity swapped between hobbyists for pennies, a Welsh IT worker named James Hows mined 8,000 coins. He did exactly what every sensible crypto evangelist now tells you to do. He held his own keys. He kept them well away from any exchange and stored them on a hard drive at home.

The single private key controlling all 8,000 coins lived on that one drive. No copies, no backup. Then in the summer of 2013, during a clear out, the drive went in the bin, out with the rubbish, off to the Dockway landfill site in Newport and into something like 100,000 tons of buried waste. Those 8,000 BTC are, of course, worth a fortune today. hundreds of millions of pounds and Hows has spent more than a decade trying to dig them back out.

The local council refused him permission to excavate at every turn. And in January 2025, the high court ended the saga for good, ruling that the drive became council property the moment it was thrown away and that his case had no realistic prospect of success. The site is now being sealed over and turned into a solar farm. So, the money is to all practical purposes gone. All right. But what's the lesson here given that Hows did most things right?

Well, holding your own keys doesn't magically protect you. It transfers the entire risk onto well you. The seed phrase is the asset which means you need to write it down on paper and don't save a copy on any electronic device. Keep copies in more than one place and yeah, make sure you're being careful about what you're throwing out. Now, five years after How's binned his entire fortune, a very different kind of disaster was reaching its peak, one where the victims handed over their money willingly.

By late 2017, you couldn't move in crypto circles without hearing the name BitConnect. Yes, the pitch was seductively simple. deposit your money and Bitconnect's proprietary volatility software, a clever trading bot apparently, would work the markets on your behalf and pay you around 1% a day. Compounded that works out to roughly 40% a month, and it was supposedly guaranteed. The bot of course did not exist. When American prosecutors later picked the scheme apart, they confirmed there was no algorithm and no trading software of any kind.

Bitconnect was an oldfashioned Ponzi scheme, paying early investors with the money pouring in from new ones and topping it off with a referral pyramid that paid generous commissions to anyone who recruited fresh deposits. When it collapsed in January 2018, it had swallowed around $2.4 4 billion and the US Department of Justice would go on to call it the largest cryptocurrency fraud charged at the time. And the maddening part is that the warning signs were everywhere.

The returns defied basic arithmetic. The structure rewarded recruitment over any actual product. And yet the token price kept climbing and the rooms kept filling up until the doubt was simply drowned out by the noise. Now, there are happily two cheap defenses here. First, the yield test. If nobody can explain in a single clear sentence where the return actually comes from, then walk away and quickly. Second, the referral test.

If recruiting new people pays better than the product itself, then the recruiting is the product and you're looking at a Ponzi. As a general rule, guaranteed and returns should never share a sentence with the word crypto. Okay, fast forward to 2022 and crypto had morphed from a fringe experiment into a multi-trillion dollar industry and the failures grew to match. In early May of that year, the terror ecosystem collapsed in one of the most devastating implosions the space has ever seen, erasing roughly $40 billion in value within days.

Terra, built by Doco Kwan's Terraform Labs, centered on two linked tokens. US was an algorithmic stable coin designed to hold a $1 peg, but unlike assetbacked stable coins, it held no cash or bonds in reserve. Instead, the PEG relied on a mint and burn mechanism with its sister token, Luna. You could always swap $1 of US for $1 worth of newly minted Luna and back again with arbitrage theoretically pinning US to the dollar.

Demand for US was propped up almost entirely by Anker protocol, which offered an eyewatering and frankly unsustainable yield of around 20%. Then between the 7th and the 9th of May, the reason that yield was unsustainable became painfully clear. Large sell-offs and withdrawals knocked US off its peg. And as panicked holders rushed for the exit, the mechanism minted enormous quantities of Luna to compensate, hyperinflating its supply from hundreds of millions of tokens into the trillions.

Luna crashed from above $80 to fractions of a cent while US sank far below a dollar and never came back. Terra had stockpiled roughly $3 billion in Bitcoin to defend the peg, deployed it during the crisis and watched the reserves vanish as the death spiral rolled on. The blockchain was eventually halted and the fallout was brutal. The collapse wiped out retail and institutional investors alike and triggered a wave of contagion that helped topple Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, Voyager, and eventually FTX.

But we'll get to that. Douan was arrested in Montenegro in 2023 and in December 2025 was sentenced by a US court to 15 years in prison for what the judge called fraud, quote, on an epic generational scale. But the terror collapse was only the first domino. The last one to fall that year was the biggest and it caught out the people who thought they were being careful. FTX was the second largest exchange in the world advertising during the Super Bowl with Tom Brady, Steph Curry, and Larry David lending their faces to the brand.

It looked like a safe, polished, quaieregulated American institution. And that was precisely the problem. The more trustworthy it appeared, the more comfortable people felt leaving their cryptos sitting on it. Then in November 2022, it emerged that around $8 billion in customer funds had simply gone missing. Behind the scenes, FTX had handed its sister trading firm, Alama Research, a secret exemption from the rules every other user faced, allowing it to borrow billions of dollars of customer money. money people believed was sitting untouched in FTX's custody.

Founder Sam Bankman Freed was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 25 years. And in June 2026, a federal appeals court upheld that conviction, describing the evidence against him as robust. Now, the lesson from FTX is the one worth holding on to the longest. An exchange is not a vault. It's an IOU. When your coins sit on an exchange, you don't actually own crypto. You own the exchange's promise to give it back when you ask.

But when the exchange goes under, that promise puts you at the back of a very long queue of creditors, often waiting years to recover pennies on the dollar, if indeed anything at all. Which is why the single highest value habit of all in crypto is self-custody. Anything you genuinely cannot afford to lose belongs off the exchange and in a wallet whose keys you control. Bearing in mind, as poor old James Hows reminds us, that this only works if you keep your backups in order.

Which brings us finally to the most recent disaster on our list and a very different beast from the frauds and fumbles that came before it. There was no villain here, no fake bot and no missing

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