Bitget's Hot Wallets Get Cold Feet: $350M Drained While Offline Cousins Stay Cozy 🧊

More than $350 million in crypto assets was drained from wallets belonging to cryptocurrency exchange Bitget in a confirmed hack, according to CEO Gracy Chen. Chen said company cold wallets, those held offline, remain "fully secure," and that only the exchange's hot wallets, those connected for daily trading, were affected by the exploit. "User funds are safe. The full amount of this loss falls within the coverage of Bitget's User Protection Fund, which currently holds over $464 million," Chen posted on X.

On-chain investigators, including Bubblemaps and Arkham analysts, first flagged the unusual activity late Thursday, initially describing Bitget as "potentially hacked." Within roughly one hour, approximately $183 million in assets moved out of wallets labeled as belonging to the exchange and into a newly created address. A Bitget security notice timestamped 18:31 UTC on September 24, 2026 confirmed that unauthorized transfers had been detected from some hot wallets and that emergency response protocols had been activated.

The exploit began when a newly created address beginning with "0xe410" took $19.67 million worth of USDT0, a cross-chain version of the dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether, and swapped them for 7,111 ETH in just six minutes. The transactions were routed through UniswapX and 1inch Fusion, services that let traders swap tokens directly on the blockchain without going through a middleman. Whoever placed the orders paid roughly 5% above the going market rate, the kind of premium associated with prioritizing speed over price.

Additional wallets tagged as Bitget's subsequently sent ETH, AVAX, BNB, USDC, USDT and XAUT, a token backed by physical gold, across multiple chains to the address 0x770b10b273fC44Fe9197D6bF20F145c2e98463Ee, which then dispersed funds to secondary addresses including 0x469Ac1406dE92f82C0563477240a3627057425DC. The User Protection Fund, which Chen said holds over $464 million, is designated to cover the loss in full, and the exchange has not indicated that customer balances are at risk.