Crypto exchange Bitget halts withdrawals after hackers steal $352 million

Crypto exchange Bitget has temporarily halted customer withdrawals after hackers stole roughly $350 million from the platform, adding another massive theft to a growing list of attacks targeting some of crypto’s biggest exchanges.

Bitget detected unauthorized transfers from several of its wallets on Thursday, CEO Gracy Chen said in a statement posted on X. The Seychelles-based exchange said the stolen assets were worth approximately $351.6 million.

The theft would make it one of the largest crypto exchange hacks in recent years. Bitget says it serves more than 120 million users worldwide.

Bitget Says Hackers Stole $352 Million

“Crypto exchange Bitget reported an estimated $351.6 million in unauthorized transfers from some of its wallets and temporarily suspended withdrawals,” Bloomberg reported.

“User funds are safe,” Chief Executive Gracy Chen said in a post on X early Friday. “The full amount of this loss falls within the coverage of Bitget’s User Protection Fund, which currently holds over $464 million.”

The withdrawal freeze immediately raised an obvious question for customers: Is their money still there?

Bitget says it is.

Chen said all user funds remain safe and that Bitget will absorb the losses using its own funds, rather than passing them on to customers.

“Withdrawals remain temporarily suspended as a security precaution, not because of any shortfall in funds,” Chen told Reuters in an emailed statement on Friday.

That distinction matters in an industry where a withdrawal suspension can quickly trigger liquidity fears. Crypto investors have seen exchanges freeze customer assets during financial crises before. Bitget is framing its decision differently, saying the pause is meant to contain a security incident rather than address a shortage of customer funds.

Another massive crypto theft puts exchange security back in focus

The attack follows an even larger breach that shook the crypto industry last year.

Hackers stole about $1.5 billion from crypto exchange Bybit in February 2025, one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts ever recorded. The FBI later attributed the attack to North Korean hackers, saying the stolen assets were converted and dispersed across thousands of blockchain addresses.

North Korea has repeatedly denied involvement in cryptocurrency theft and cyberattacks.

The Bitget incident shows why large centralized exchanges remain attractive targets. A successful compromise can give attackers access to hundreds of millions of dollars in digital assets that can be transferred across blockchain networks within minutes.

Moving stolen crypto is one thing. Cashing it out without detection is another. Blockchain transactions leave public records, giving investigators, exchanges and analytics firms a trail to follow. Attackers frequently respond by splitting stolen funds across many wallets, swapping assets and moving them across different networks.

For Bitget, the immediate challenge is containing the breach, tracing the missing assets and restoring withdrawals without creating further risk for customers.

The company has said its own balance sheet will cover the roughly $351.6 million loss. If that commitment holds, customers may be financially insulated from the theft itself.

The bigger question is how hackers moved hundreds of millions of dollars out of Bitget-controlled wallets in the first place. That answer could matter far beyond Bitget’s 120 million users. After last year’s $1.5 billion Bybit theft, another nine-figure breach reminds us that crypto exchanges can grow enormous without becoming too large for hackers to target.