Crypto exchange Bitget says $352 million affected in a hack, claims user funds are 'safe'

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen announced the hack shortly after independent researchers flagged unusual wallet movements.

Crypto exchange Bitget had $351.6 million dollars exposed to a system breach on Thursday, CEO Gracy Chen announced in a social media post.

In a post on X, Chen said that Bitget’s cold wallets and user funds were safe, and that there were “unauthorized transfers from some of our hot wallets.” The exchange maintains a “user protection fund” that had over $464 million in it, she said.

“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 added.

Deposits and trading remain online, she said, but the exchange is “temporarily” pausing withdrawals until it can finish a security review.

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.

“Looks like Bitget just got hacked for $178M,” he said, noting that more are moving in a separate post.

She promised that the company would publish an incident report within 24 hours.

Hot wallets remain connected to systems used to process transactions and withdrawals, making them more accessible than cold wallets, which are designed to keep signing credentials isolated from internet-connected infrastructure.

Bitget potentially losing up to $351.6 million marks this event as possibly the biggest hack of 2026. September in particular has been rough on the market, after the Liquid Network lost $320 million earlier this month to another hack, though the attackers there claimed to be “white hat hackers.”

Bitget’s native token, BGB, fell sharply after news of the hack began circulating, but had already recovered a bit by 22:10 UTC. The token was down 2.9% as of press time. Bitcoin’s price was down some 0.29%, while ether’s price was down 0.2% over the past 24 hours’ trading.

UPDATE (Sept. 24, 2026, 22:10 UTC): Adds market reaction to the news of the hack.

UPDATE (Sept. 24, 2026, 22:05 UTC): Clarifies language surrounding the exploit.

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