How Can You Check if an Exchange Has Been Hacked Before?
No major exchange has a perfectly clean history — what matters is how it responded to past incidents. Here's where to check, and what to weigh.
An exchange's past security incidents are relevant history worth checking before trusting it with meaningful funds — not necessarily disqualifying on their own, but informative about how the platform actually responded when something went wrong.
Why Past Incidents Are Worth Checking at All
No major exchange has an entirely clean record across the industry's history — checking for past incidents isn't about finding a platform with zero history, since that bar may be unrealistic, but about understanding what happened, how the exchange responded, and whether affected users were made whole.
Where to Find This Information
Independent crypto news coverage, industry-tracking websites that maintain records of major exchange hacks and incidents, and the exchange's own public statements about past events (checked for consistency against independent reporting) are the main sources — not the exchange's own marketing materials alone, which have an obvious incentive to minimize past problems.
Why How an Exchange Responded Matters More Than Whether an Incident Happened
An exchange that experienced a hack, disclosed it promptly, and made affected users whole from its own reserves demonstrates something meaningfully different than one that experienced a similar incident and either concealed it, delayed disclosure, or left users bearing the loss.
Why the Scale and Recency of Past Incidents Matter
A minor, contained incident from many years ago, promptly resolved, carries different weight than a large-scale breach, or one that happened recently — checking both how severe and how recent any past incidents were provides more useful context than treating "any incident, ever" as equally disqualifying.
Why Checking Security Practices Since an Incident Matters
Some exchanges have made substantial, verifiable security improvements following a past incident — cold storage practices, additional audits, or structural changes to how funds are held. Checking whether an exchange has published information about changes made since a past incident adds useful context beyond the incident itself.
Why This Connects to Checking Proof of Reserves
An exchange's response to a past hack, combined with whether it currently publishes verifiable proof of reserves, together provide a more complete picture of current trustworthiness than either check alone.
Why This Check Matters More the More You Plan to Hold There
The relevance of an exchange's security history scales with how much you're considering holding on the platform and for how long — a quick, small trade carries less exposure to this specific risk than treating an exchange as a long-term custodian for significant holdings.
What to Actually Search For
The exchange's name combined with terms like "hack," "breach," or "security incident" across independent news sources, checking both the details of what happened and how the exchange responded afterward.
Check an exchange's security history and proof of reserves together before deciding how much to hold there — past incidents matter less than how they were actually handled.