Crypto exchange Bitget said it lost $351.6 million in a security breach Thursday, in an attack that may be the largest hack of 2026.
CEO Gracy Chen announced the incident in a post on X, saying unauthorized transfers had been made from some of the exchange's hot wallets. Cold wallets and user funds remained secure, she said, and the breach was limited to a portion of the hot and warm wallet layers under Bitget's three-tier architecture.
Onchain data had earlier flagged unusual wallet movements, with blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence reporting approximately $178 million in assets moved from three Bitget hot wallets and one cold wallet across multiple blockchains before being consolidated into a single address. The affected assets included ETH, BNB, AVAX and USDT, according to analyst Emmett Gallic at Arkham.
Chen said the exchange maintains a user-protection fund with more than $464 million, which would be sufficient to cover the stolen amount. Deposits and trading operations continued as normal, but withdrawals were temporarily paused while the company completed a security review. Bitget promised to publish a full incident report within 24 hours.
The hack marks a difficult month for cryptocurrency exchanges. Earlier in September, the Liquid Network lost $320 million to a separate breach, although the attackers there identified themselves as "white hat hackers." Hot wallets, which remain connected to internet-facing systems that process transactions and withdrawals, are inherently more vulnerable than cold wallets, which store signing credentials offline.
