Bitget chief doubts much of the $388m stolen in hack will be recovered
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen says she is 'not very optimistic' about recovering much of the roughly $388m stolen in the exchange's 24 September hack, with withdrawals resuming in phases this week.
Bitget chief executive Gracy Chen says she is “not very optimistic” about recovering much of the roughly $388m stolen from the crypto exchange’s hot wallets in a 24 September hack, citing Bybit’s $1.5bn breach in February 2025 as a benchmark.
Speaking on Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction podcast, Chen noted Bybit had frozen or recovered only about $80m — around 3.5% of the total stolen — while TradingView reported that none of it has actually been recovered.
Bitget initially put its loss at $351.6m, but revised the figure to $387.5m after accounting for additional transfers on Zcash and Tron. Security firm SlowMist traced the earliest malicious activity to 31 August, when an attacker exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a third-party security product.
Withdrawals are resuming in phases: Bitcoin withdrawals were restored on Monday, Ether follows on Tuesday and Tether’s USDT on Wednesday, with all other tokens and peer-to-peer services due back on Friday. Bitget’s Protection Fund now stands at $309m.
The exchange is offering 5% of frozen funds and 5% of recovered funds as bounties. North Korean hackers were the main suspect based on preliminary IP address evidence, though Chen had not ruled out other possibilities.
Sources:
- https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitget-hack-zero-day-slowmist-investigation
- https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitget-operations-protection-fund-security-breach
- https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitget-btc-withdrawal-hacker-eth-swap-thorchain
- https://crypto-economy.com/bitget-ceo-warns-388m-breach-recovery-unlikely-cites-bybit-hack/
- https://www.tradingview.com/news/bloomingbit:a76075246094b:0-bitget-ceo-not-optimistic-on-freezing-recovering-388-million-in-hacked-funds/
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