$3.4B in Ethereum Vanished: How Human Errors and Smart Contract Flaws Burned Crypto Fortunes

The crypto graveyard just got richer—Ethereum users and buggy contracts have collectively torched over $3.4 billion. Forever.

How? A brutal combo of fat-fingered transactions and code that didn’t bend but broke. No bailouts, no undo button—just the blockchain’s cold, immutable ledger.

Smart contracts, dumb outcomes. Even Wall Street’s ‘oops’ moments come with a safety net—try explaining that to crypto’s decentralized purists.

Topping the list is the Web3 Foundation, which lost 306,000 ETH due to a vulnerability in the Parity multisig wallet. The defunct canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX lost 60,000 ETH through a faulty smart contract. NFT project Akutars mistakenly burned 11,500 ETH during a botched minting process.

Additionally, users have inexplicably sent over 25,000 ETH directly to burn addresses, permanently removing them from circulation.

Losses could be higher

Meanwhile, Grogan emphasized that the $3.4 billion figure is a conservative estimate.

According to him, the figure only accounts for provably inaccessible ETH, such as coins trapped in flawed contracts or burn addresses. It does not include ETH tied to lost private keys or dormant wallets from Ethereum’s early days, like Genesis wallets that haven’t moved funds in years.

He also pointed out that the figure is significantly higher when factoring in Ethereum’s destruction via the EIP-1559 burn mechanism, with more than 5.3 million ETH permanently removed from circulation. This total exceeds 5% of all ETH ever minted and represents over $23.4 billion in value.