Bitget 'Potentially Hacked' as $183 Million Vanishes From Exchange Wallets

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.