Reports Emerge of Possible Bitget Hack — More Than $170 Million May Have Been Withdrawn from Wallets

Reports have emerged in the crypto community about suspicious movement of assets from addresses labeled by blockchain services as Hot Wallet and Cold Wallet of the Bitget exchange. According to preliminary estimates by on-chain observers, the transfers may exceed $170 million, and some of the assets began being converted into ETH after withdrawal.

At the time of publication, Bitget had not confirmed a hack or compromise of its wallets. The exchange’s official announcement center has no notice of a security incident, of operations being suspended due to an attack, or of user funds being lost.

So the unusual transactions cannot yet be definitively called a theft. Large exchanges regularly move funds between hot and cold wallets, change the structure of their reserves, and carry out technical consolidation of assets.

Additional uncertainty stems from the fact that labels such as Bitget Hot Wallet in blockchain explorers are assigned by third-party analytics services and by themselves prove neither that each address belongs to the exchange nor that an attack occurred.

Bitget keeps publishing routine service announcements

After reports of the suspicious transactions appeared, Bitget continued to publish standard technical notices. Among the latest announcements are maintenance on certain products, changes to futures parameters, and temporary suspensions of deposits and withdrawals on certain networks.

As of the time of checking, there is no separate warning to users about a compromise of the infrastructure.

The latest Proof of Reserves for September, published on September 17, showed a combined reserve ratio of 135%. In the same update, Bitget expanded the list of verifiable assets from four to 19.

However, Proof of Reserves is a snapshot of reserves at a specific moment and by itself cannot confirm or refute a later incident.

Protection fund exceeded $300 million

Bitget also operates a Protection Fund, created to provide additional protection for users in emergency situations.

According to the August report, its average value was about $382 million, its monthly high reached $441 million, and its low was $345 million. The exchange says it intends to keep the fund’s value above $300 million at all times.

The existence of such a fund also does not mean that the alleged incident has already been recognized as an insured event or that payouts will be made from it.

For now, the most accurate way to describe this is as a possible security incident at Bitget. Confirming a hack would require a statement from the exchange itself or a more detailed on-chain analysis that rules out internal transfers and other routine operations.

If the reports are confirmed and it turns out that more than $170 million was indeed withdrawn by a third party, the incident will become one of the largest hacks of a centralized crypto exchange in recent times.