- Bitget opened withdrawals on the Bitcoin network on 28 September, four days after it says unauthorised transfers left some of its hot wallets.
- The official notice runs to two sentences. It says nothing about ether, tether, the size of the loss or when other assets follow.
- Nearly 5,000 BTC has since left the exchange’s tracked reserves, most of it customer withdrawals, according to CryptoSlate.
Four days is a long time to watch money you own sit on an exchange you cannot move it off. Customers of Bitget have just had that. On 28 September the exchange said bitcoin withdrawals were open again, in a notice running to two sentences.
Coins held on an offshore exchange come with one line of defence after a breach: the exchange’s promise to cover it. There is no UK compensation scheme sitting behind that promise. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme protects bank deposits and certain regulated investments, not cryptoassets on a global trading platform, so if a company fund falls short there is no statutory route to claim the difference.
Bitget says customer balances are unaffected and that its Protection Fund will absorb the cost. That is the exchange’s own account of its own finances, and nobody outside the company can currently check it.
What the notice actually says
The support-centre post is a company announcement rather than a report, and it reads like one. In full, the substance is: “Bitget has now opened the withdrawal service on the BTC – BITCOIN network.” It closes: “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused during the suspension and thank you for your understanding.”
That is the entire document. It opens with “Dear users” and ends with thanks. There is no timestamp on the first cleared transfer, no transaction data, no queue length, no indication of how many people were waiting.
Opening a service and processing a withdrawal are separate events. The notice records the first and says nothing about the second, which is the one that matters to somebody refreshing the page.
What it leaves out
Everything else in the story comes from elsewhere. CryptoSlate, citing other Bitget support articles, reports that the exchange’s systems detected unauthorised transfers from some hot wallets at 18:31 UTC on 24 September, that withdrawals were suspended while trading and deposits stayed open, and that a phased reopening plan set 08:00 UTC targets for successive assets and networks.
The loss estimate moved too. Bitget first put the affected assets at about $351.6m, then revised it on 25 September to roughly $387.5m, around £290m, after identifying further transactions from the same incident. The exchange’s position, per that reporting, is that the revision was better accounting rather than fresh thefts. Whether $387.5m is the final number is a different question, and one a revision upward does not close.
CryptoSlate also observed BTC and ETH futures trades on Bitget’s public feed early on Monday. Trading engines and withdrawal rails are different systems. Visible order flow tells you the market is running; it does not tell you assets can leave. Ether and tether withdrawals are not covered by the notice at all.
Nearly 5,000 bitcoin has left
The clearest evidence that the queue is genuinely moving did not come from the notice. It came a day later, when Bitget chief executive Gracy Chen said the exchange had processed 9,585 withdrawal orders totalling 4,098.036 BTC as of 17:00 UTC+8 on 28 September, according to CryptoSlate. At a bitcoin price around $83,000 that is roughly $340m walking out of the door in a day.
CryptoSlate’s own reserve tracking puts the total closer to 5,000 BTC leaving Bitget’s watched addresses since the reopening. Reserve figures of that kind are worth understanding before reading much into them. Analysts follow wallet addresses they believe belong to an exchange, usually because the exchange published them. What you get is the balance in the addresses you know about, at the moment you looked. It is not an audit, it does not show liabilities, and an exchange can hold coins in wallets nobody outside has identified.
So the outflow shows people getting money off the platform, which is the thing they wanted. It does not show whether what remains covers what is owed.
What a protection fund is, and isn’t
A user protection fund is a pot of the exchange’s own money that it has committed to using if customers are hurt. It is a promise, not an insurance policy. There is no regulator setting the balance, no policy document a customer can enforce, and no third party obliged to pay if the company decides it cannot. Several large exchanges run them and several have paid out, which is a track record rather than a guarantee.
For a UK holder the practical position is the same one that applies to any offshore platform, and it is covered in our guide to exchange withdrawals and our guide to self-custody. The recourse is the company’s own commitment.
What to watch
Whether ether and tether withdrawals open on the timetable Bitget has described, and whether the exchange publishes anything more detailed than a two-sentence notice when they do. A queue that clears for one asset and stalls on another is the pattern worth watching.
And whether the $387.5m figure moves again. It has been revised once already. A second revision, in either direction, would say more about how well the exchange understands what happened than any announcement about restored services.