Bitget reopens withdrawals from Sept. 28, but XRP waits until Oct. 2 as the hacker moves $83 million of it

Bitget has set dates for reopening withdrawals after Thursday's $387.5 million breach, starting with bitcoin on Monday, September 28, according to crypto.news and CoinDesk. The exchange said it has found and fixed the vulnerabilities behind the incident and is working with Mandiant and SlowMist on the investigation. Meanwhile, the attacker has moved about $83 million of stolen XRP out of its first holding wallets, CoinDesk reported from XRP Ledger records.

The reopening schedule

Every stage starts at 08:00 UTC, which is 4 a.m. in New York.

Bitget told users to confirm each stage on its official channels before assuming a service is live, crypto.news reported. For someone holding XRP, Solana, Dogecoin or dollars on the exchange, Friday is the date that matters: counting from the breach at 18:31 UTC on September 24, that is roughly seven and a half days without the ability to move those funds off the platform. Trading and deposits have continued throughout.

The XRP nobody can freeze

About 103 million XRP was taken on Thursday and split across five accounts, CoinDesk said. By 12:41 UTC Saturday, two accounts that each started with 20 million XRP were down to a few dozen tokens, a third held about 5.8 million, and roughly 49 million XRP remained in the original five accounts, about $75 million. Unlike USDC or USDT, which Circle and Tether can blacklist, XRP itself has no freeze function, so recovery depends on the coins reaching an exchange that can lock the receiving account. The transfers show the funds being spread across more wallets; they do not show how much has been sold.

Here is the number behind that. At Coinbase's price of $1.5235 at 7:01 p.m. ET Saturday, the full 103 million XRP is worth about $157 million. Coinbase itself traded about 54.5 million XRP in the past 24 hours. The stolen stash is nearly twice that, and the 49 million still sitting in the original accounts alone is close to a full day of Coinbase's XRP volume. CoinDesk put it at about 4% of XRP's $4.4 billion daily volume across all venues. How much a sale would move the price depends on the buy orders waiting when it happens.

XRP was down 2.9% over 24 hours on Coinbase and up about 8% from its September 19 close. We found no report tying Saturday's dip to the hacker's transfers, and we are not drawing that link.

The protection fund check

Bitget says its User Protection Fund, which it puts at more than $464 million, covers the loss. As we calculated on Friday, the fund is held as 5,500 bitcoin, so it equals the $387.5 million loss only while bitcoin is above about $70,455. At Coinbase's $84,311 on Saturday evening, the fund is worth about $463.7 million and bitcoin sits about 16% above that line. Bitcoin moved less than 0.5% on the day, so the cushion is unchanged.

Earlier coverage: the breach and the stablecoin freeze. Today's prices are in our Saturday crypto report and on crypto prices.

Sources: CoinDesk, crypto.news, Coinbase Exchange. Dollar values, volume comparison and fund value are calculations by The Company Chronicle at Coinbase prices. Crypto assets are volatile. This is market information, not investment advice.