Bitget pauses withdrawals after a $351.6 million hot-wallet breach, about 76% of its protection fund

Crypto exchange Bitget said on Thursday that unauthorized transfers took about $351.6 million in assets out of some of its hot and warm wallets, and it has paused withdrawals while it investigates. Chief executive Gracy Chen said cold wallets were not touched, user account balances remain accurate, and deposits and trading are running normally, according to CoinDesk and Cointelegraph.

Bitget said its systems detected the transfers at 18:31 UTC, or 2:31 p.m. in New York. It has flagged the receiving addresses, contacted law enforcement and on-chain security firms, and promised hourly updates plus a full incident report with a root-cause analysis within 24 hours. It has not said how the wallets were compromised.

The number behind "user funds are safe"

Chen's reassurance rests on one figure: Bitget's User Protection Fund, which she said holds more than $464 million. The loss uses up about 76% of that. If the fund absorbs the full $351.6 million, roughly $112 million would be left to cover any future incident, unless Bitget tops it up. The exchange has not said whether it will.

The size of the breach also moved during the afternoon. Independent researchers first flagged about $178 million to $183 million leaving wallets labeled as Bitget's. Arkham Intelligence analyst Emmett Gallic said the transfers came from three hot wallets and one cold wallet across several blockchains and were consolidated into a single address, with ETH, BNB, AVAX and USDT0 among the assets, CoinDesk reported. Bitget's own figure ended up about twice the first estimate. Gallic's mention of a cold wallet is not consistent with Chen's statement that cold wallets were untouched, and neither side has explained the difference. The incident report should.

Who is actually affected

For now, the practical problem is access, not balances. Anyone with coins or stablecoins on Bitget can trade but cannot move money off the exchange until withdrawals reopen, and Bitget has not given a date. Traders who use the exchange for margin or to move collateral between venues are the most exposed to that delay, because they cannot shift funds elsewhere if prices move.

The wider market barely reacted. Bitget's own token, BGB, fell sharply when the news broke and then recovered part of the drop, CoinDesk said. CoinGecko showed BGB at about $2.00, down about 2% on the day, with a market value near $1.4 billion. Bitcoin was at $84,232 on Coinbase late Thursday, down 0.4%, and ether at $2,684, down 0.2%.

A bad month for hot wallets

If the figure holds, CoinDesk said this could be the largest crypto hack of 2026. It comes weeks after Liquid Network lost $320 million earlier in September, though the attackers there claimed to be "white hat" hackers. Earlier on Thursday, crypto casino Duelbits also went offline after a $7 million hot-wallet hack. Hot wallets stay connected to the systems that process withdrawals, which is what makes them convenient and also what makes them the target.

Earlier today we covered the Fed's proposed stablecoin rules, which deal with reserves and capital but not exchange custody. Live prices: crypto prices.

Sources: CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, CoinGecko, Coinbase Exchange. Prices as of about 6:50 p.m. ET on Sept. 24, 2026. This is market information, not investment advice.