Karl Crypto

Bitget had $351.6 million exposed to a system breach on Thursday, Chief Executive Officer Gracy Chen said in a social-media post, according to CoinDesk. In a post on X, Chen said Bitget's cold wallets and user funds were safe and that there had been "unauthorized transfers from some of our hot wallets," adding that the exchange's "user protection fund" held over $464 million. "Cold wallets remain fully secure. Bitget operates a three-tier wallet architecture — the breach contained only a portion of the hot wallet and warm wallet layers," she said. Deposits and trading remain online, but Bitget is "temporarily" pausing withdrawals until it completes a security review, and Chen promised an incident report within 24 hours.

On-chain data and independent researchers had earlier flagged unusual wallet movements, initially reporting that about $183 million in digital assets had moved from wallets tied to the exchange. Emmett Gallic, an analyst at blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence, said on X the transactions involved three Bitget hot wallets and one cold wallet across multiple blockchains, with funds consolidated into a single address and assets including ETH, BNB, AVAX and USDT0. "Looks like Bitget just got hacked for $178M," he said, noting in a separate post that more were moving. Hot wallets stay connected to transaction and withdrawal systems, making them more accessible than cold wallets, which keep signing credentials isolated from internet-connected infrastructure.

A loss of up to $351.6 million would mark possibly the biggest hack of 2026, capping a rough September after the Liquid Network lost $320 million earlier this month to another attack, though those attackers claimed to be "white hat hackers." Bitget's native token, BGB, fell after news of the breach began circulating but had recovered somewhat by 22:10 UTC, down 2.9% at press time. Bitcoin was down about 0.29% and ether down 0.2% over the past 24 hours.