Bitget Customers Withdraw Over 4,000 Bitcoins in One Hour Following $388M Hack
Bitcoin Magazine Bitget Customers Withdraw Over 4,000 Bitcoins in One Hour Following $388M Hack Bitget this week resumed customer withdrawals and within one hour, users had taken over 4,000 bitcoins...
Bitget this week resumed customer withdrawals and within one hour, users had taken over 4,000 bitcoins off the exchange.
Investors withdrew over 4,000 bitcoins worth over $334 million at today’s prices in one hour after hacked Bitget resumed customer withdrawals, the company’s CEO has said.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen told Bloomberg Television Tuesday that withdrawals from the exchange had since stabilized following the immediate bitcoin transactions.
Hackers last week made away with $388 million in crypto after targeting the Victoria, Seychelles-based exchange’s hot wallets.
“The withdrawals actually stabilized a lot today,” Chen said. “Those hundreds of millions [in bitcoin withdrawals] actually most of them happen on the first hour of the withdrawal restart.”
In a Monday X post, Chen said that 9,585 orders of 4,098 bitcoins were processed. The exchange is allowing customers to withdraw funds in phases.
Bitget froze withdrawals after blockchain experts flagged that money was leaving the exchange. Bitget later said the attack method in the incident was “highly consistent with known patterns of North Korean hacker organizations.”
Chen said that no cold storage funds were touched but rather attackers had “exploited vulnerabilities from third-party products to steal internal credentials, then used those credentials to send fraudulent withdrawal commands that bypassed our risk controls.”
She added that the company was using its own money to top up its protection fund after it dropped in size. Bloomberg reported that it was below $200 million after standing at $464 million before the hack.
Bitget said that it was the first “security incident of this nature in eight years.”
“The incident remains contained, and no further unauthorized transfers are possible,” the exchange noted.
Bitget is the sixth biggest by trading volume, according to CoinGecko, processing in the past 24 hours $811 million in transactions. The exchange’s customers are mostly based in Asia.
Attackers linked to North Korea’s government have long targeted crypto exchanges and are some of the most sophisticated cyber criminals out there.
Asanat Analysis — Why it matters
Bitget's $388M security breach and subsequent mass withdrawal event demonstrates how exchange hacks trigger immediate liquidity crises even when the exchange maintains solvency. The 4,000 BTC exodus (≈$240M at current rates) within 60 minutes shows customers voting with their feet—a rational response given reputational damage and uncertainty around actual fund safety. This mirrors the post-FTX playbook: once trust fractures, even solvent exchanges face bank-run dynamics as users frontrun potential secondary failures.
The speed of the withdrawal surge signals several second-order risks. First, forced asset liquidations to meet redemptions could spike slippage on Bitget's market-making operations, compressing trading revenue at a critical moment. Second, the visible mass exodus accelerates contagion narratives across the broader exchange ecosystem, pressuring other platforms' reserves and potentially triggering regulatory scrutiny on custody practices. Bitget's ability to process 4,000 BTC/hour suggests adequate on-hand reserves, but the psychological damage from a $388M hack—regardless of recovery odds—may prove harder to reverse than the technical breach itself.
This incident reinforces a persistent sector vulnerability: exchange operational security and user confidence remain decoupled from blockchain's transparency. Even fully-backed exchanges cannot survive sustained loss-of-confidence events, a dynamic that has previously accelerated migration to self-custody solutions and decentralized trading venues.