Crypto exchange Bitget had $351.6 million exposed to a system breach on Thursday, CEO Gracy Chen announced in a social media post, adding that cold wallets and user funds remain safe.
In a post on X, Chen said there were "unauthorized transfers from some of our hot wallets" while cold wallets "remain fully secure." She said Bitget operates a three-tier wallet architecture and that the breach contained only a portion of the hot wallet and warm wallet layers. The exchange maintains a "user protection fund" that had over $464 million in it, according to Chen.
Deposits and trading remain online, Chen said, but the exchange is "temporarily" pausing withdrawals until it completes a security review. She promised the company would publish an incident report within 24 hours.
Onchain data and independent blockchain researchers had earlier flagged unusual wallet movements, initially reporting that around $183 million in digital assets had moved from wallets labeled as belonging to the exchange. Emmett Gallic, an analyst at blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence, said in an X post that the transactions involved three Bitget hot wallets and one cold wallet across multiple blockchains, with the funds consolidated into a single address. The assets included ETH, BNB, AVAX and USDT0, according to his analysis. Gallic initially said Bitget had "just got hacked for $178M," noting in a separate post that more funds were moving.
