4 min read
More than $350 million in crypto assets has been drained from wallets belonging to cryptocurrency exchange Bitget in a confirmed hack, according to CEO Gracy Chen.
Chen said company cold wallets, those held offline, remain "fully secure," and that only the exchange's hot wallets, those connected for daily trading, were affected by the exploit.
"User funds are safe. The full amount of this loss falls within the coverage of Bitget's User Protection Fund, which currently holds over $464 million," Chen posted on X.
On-chain sleuths, including Bubblemaps and Arkham analysts, initially flagged the unusual activity late Thursday as Bitget, one of the world's larger centralized trading platforms, being "potentially hacked." Within about an hour, roughly $183 million in assets moved out of wallets labeled as belonging to the exchange and into a newly created address.
The first sign came from a hot wallet—the internet-connected reserve an exchange uses to process everyday withdrawals quickly, as opposed to a cold wallet kept offline for safekeeping. A newly created address, beginning with “0xe410,” took $19.67 million worth of USDT0—a cross-chain version of the dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether— and swapped them for 7,111 ETH in just six minutes. Unlike USDT, ETH is decentralized and hard to seize.
Based on reports, the purchase ran through UniswapX and 1inch Fusion, services that let traders swap tokens directly on the blockchain without going through a middleman. Whoever placed those orders paid roughly 5% above the going market rate, the kind of premium that shows up when speed matters more than getting a good price. It's a classic signal of a hacker trying to move quickly.
More transfers then followed.
Additional wallets tagged as Bitget's sent ETH, AVAX, BNB, USDC, USDT, and XAUT—a token backed by physical gold—to the same address, according to pseudonymous on-chain researcher DCF GOD, who first flagged the activity on X.
Outflows from the exchange's publicly labeled wallets appeared to stop roughly six minutes after the first suspicious trade and stayed quiet for at least 20 minutes afterward, a pattern consistent with an exchange freezing withdrawals while it investigates.
Representatives for Bitget did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.
When you deposit money on an exchange like Bitget, you're trusting that company to guard it in wallets it controls, not so different from handing cash to a bank teller. The difference is there's no government deposit insurance waiting to make customers whole if that vault gets cracked, which is exactly why "not your keys, not your coins" became a crypto mantra in the first place.
This wouldn't be the first time that trust got tested. In 2023, Bitget touted a $300 million protection fund built specifically to cover hacks, theft, and similar losses. It appears that protection fund has since grown, with the company's CEO today confirming it holds over $464 million and will cover customer losses.
The exchange has plenty of company. Rival exchange Bybit lost $1.4 billion in February 2025 after attackers spoofed a signing screen to hijack a routine cold-wallet transfer, the largest crypto theft on record. Across the industry last year, hackers stole a combined $2.72 billion from exchanges and protocols.
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to include comment from Bitget CEO Gracy Chen confirming the hack.
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