• Around $351.6m left Bitget’s hot and warm wallets in unauthorised transfers on 24 September. Withdrawals are paused. Deposits and trading are not.
  • Chief executive Gracy Chen says the full loss is covered by a User Protection Fund holding more than $464m, and that customer balances are unchanged.
  • The exchange has not published a full account of how the wallets were compromised, and says it will not speculate while the investigation runs.

Bitget customers can still deposit and still trade. What they cannot do, as of Wednesday evening, is take their money off the platform. The exchange says about $351.6m was moved out of its wallets without authorisation, and that it has paused withdrawals while it works out how.

If you hold anything on Bitget, you cannot move it right now, and the assurance that it is safe rests on the company’s own reserves rather than on any compensation scheme.

That second part is worth understanding properly, because it applies well beyond this one exchange. Money held on a crypto platform is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, the way the first £85,000 in a UK bank account is. If an exchange cannot cover a loss, there is no backstop that steps in.

What can be established from outside the company

We have not seen a primary statement from Bitget. This piece is built from CryptoSlate’s write-up and CoinDesk’s reporting of comments Chen made on X, and where the two differ we have said so rather than smoothing it over.

On the shared account: the transfers were detected at 18:31 UTC on 24 September, Bitget says its emergency procedures were triggered within minutes, and its were untouched. Chen’s position on the money is direct. “The full amount of this loss falls within the coverage of Bitget’s User Protection Fund,” she said, with that fund reported at more than $464m.

The picture is less complete than the headline figure implies. Analysis from Bubblemaps, cited by CryptoSlate, tracked fifteen transfers moving close to $192m across seven assets, with ether the largest single component at 44.4%. That is a little over half the stated total. The gap may simply be transfers the analysts had not yet attributed when they published, but nobody outside the company can confirm the $351.6m figure independently at this stage.

Why an exchange keeps money somewhere it can be taken from

Explore the serene Gothic architecture of a cathedral hallway with elegant arches.
A vaulted cathedral hallway, arches receding into the dark: heavy stone architecture built to keep things safe is not the same as architecture built to let things move, and an exchange has to do both at once. Photo by Ruben Boekeloo on Pexels.

A hot wallet is an account whose keys sit on a machine connected to the internet, so that transactions can be signed automatically and instantly. A cold wallet keeps its keys offline and needs human intervention to move anything. A warm wallet sits between the two, partially automated but with more restrictions.

Exchanges run all three because customers expect a withdrawal to land in minutes. The overwhelming majority of the money is meant to sit cold, with a working float kept hot to service day-to-day movement. Bitget says the breach was confined to hot and warm wallets, which is consistent with how these losses usually happen, and is also the reason the loss was a fraction of what the platform holds rather than all of it.

Safe and frozen can both be true

The two claims that look contradictory here, funds are safe and withdrawals are off, are not actually in tension. Once a working float has been drained, an exchange has a smaller pool of liquid assets to pay out from, and a queue of nervous customers all trying to leave at once would empty what remains. Pausing withdrawals buys time to move funds out of cold storage and, more importantly, to be sure the attacker has been shut out first. Reopening the taps while a compromise is still live would repeat the loss.

That reasoning is standard, and it is also exactly what an exchange in genuine trouble would say. The difference between the two situations only shows up in whether withdrawals actually reopen, and how quickly.

The distinction Chen drew, and why it matters

According to CoinDesk, Chen said the attackers compromised a wallet backend and spoofed transaction data, rather than obtaining .

In plain terms: the secret numbers that control the wallets were not stolen. Instead, the system that decides which transactions to sign was fed instructions that looked legitimate and were approved. The distinction sounds academic. It is not. Leaked keys mean every address derived from them is permanently burnt and everything has to be migrated to new ones, which takes days and is visible on-chain. A tricked signing process can, in principle, be patched and restarted much faster.

Our inference, and we are labelling it as one: the faster-fix reading is the optimistic one, and it depends entirely on Bitget knowing precisely how the backend was reached. Until the exchange publishes that, it cannot rule out that the same access allowed other things.

What UK readers have behind them

Nothing, in the formal sense. Bitget does not appear on the FCA’s register of firms permitted to serve UK consumers, and even the platforms that are registered offer no FSCS cover on cryptoasset balances. The UK’s full cryptoasset regime does not come into force until 25 October 2027, with authorisation applications opening before then. Until it does, “your funds are safe” is a statement about a company’s balance sheet, not a legal protection.

There is precedent in both directions. When Bybit lost roughly $1.4bn in February 2025, it covered the shortfall from reserves and borrowed liquidity and kept withdrawals running throughout. Mt. Gox, in 2014, could not, and its creditors waited a decade. Bitget’s $464m fund comfortably exceeds the stated loss on paper. Whether it is as liquid as the number suggests is a separate question, and one the company has not yet been asked to evidence.

What to watch

Three things. Whether withdrawals reopen, and how completely: a partial reopening with limits is a different signal from a full one. Whether Bitget publishes a fresh proof-of-reserves attestation showing the protection fund intact after the payout. And whether the affected-asset list grows, because the on-chain total tracked so far accounts for barely half the loss the company has admitted.

If you are weighing up where to keep coins after this, our guide to exchange withdrawals covers what a pause usually means in practice, and the self-custody guide sets out the trade-offs of holding your own keys, which carry their own risks rather than none.