Bitget’s Own Signer Let $351.6 Million Walk Out

Bitget said unauthorized transfers drained about $351.6 million from hot and warm wallets at 18:31 UTC on September 24, 2026. CEO Gracy Chen said cold wallets stayed secure and a user protection fund holding over $464 million covers the loss. She later said the attackers never took private keys. They spoofed transfer data and triggered Bitget’s own signing process, so the chain saw a valid payout.

Withdrawals are paused. Deposits and trading stayed open. The largest line in the haul is XRP, and most of that balance has not been swapped off the XRP Ledger.

Attackers Fed Forged Transfers Into Bitget’s Own Signer

Chen’s second update, posted at 00:43 UTC on September 25, is the exchange’s working account of the method. A backend system inside the wallet stack was breached. That system fed fake transfer data into the approval path the exchange already uses to move coins. The signer then did what it is built to do.

The attacker compromised a critical backend system within our wallet infrastructure, used it to spoof transaction data, and triggered our authorization process to move funds out. Private key compromise has been ruled out.

Gracy Chen, CEO, Bitget, on X

Here is what we can confirm at this stage:

On the attack:
Our security team has made initial progress in tracing the source. The attacker compromised a critical backend system within our wallet infrastructure, used it to spoof transaction data, and triggered our authorization… https://t.co/5nINjwbXpC

— Gracy Chen @Bitget (@GracyBitget) September 25, 2026

She said loss containment is confirmed and no further unapproved transfers are possible. The way the backend was entered is still under review. A full technical report will follow once that review is done. She also said the attackers did not fake customer withdrawal tickets and did not obtain keys for cold, hot or warm wallets.

That last point is the part other exchanges should sit with. Copied keys would have left every address those keys controlled open until funds were moved. What Chen describes is a failure in front of the signer. Bitget’s own approval process signed payments that a compromised system had written.

On-chain timing fits that account better than a stolen key used outside Bitget’s systems. Yuzu Research, reading the Ethereum-family legs, found the drained wallets are ordinary single-key accounts, which rules out the Safe multisig front-end trick used against Bybit in 2025. Attacker transfers sit inside Bitget’s live nonce sequence, at the same gas price as user withdrawals, and they carry the fixed gas limits of Bitget’s internal-transfer template. Waves hit five chains within 9 to 15 seconds. To a block explorer, the drain looks like Bitget paying itself, until you check the destination.

[SECURITY NOTICE] Bitget Hot Wallet Incident — September 24, 2026

At 18:31 UTC on September 24, 2026, Bitget's security systems detected unauthorized transfers from some of our hot wallets. Our security team activated emergency response protocols immediately.

What we have…

— Gracy Chen @Bitget (@GracyBitget) September 24, 2026

Why the XRP Ledger Carried the Biggest Loss

Early alerts watched Ethereum-family wallets and put the haul near $170 million to $190 million. The XRP Ledger legs were the missing mass. Lookonchain’s itemized list names nine assets and puts 102.93 million XRP stolen at $157.48 million, ahead of 31,890 ETH at $85.75 million.

LOOKONCHAIN’S NINE-ASSET TALLY

Lookonchain’s sum is about $5.26 million above Bitget’s $351.6 million figure, a gap that tracks price stamps and scope rather than a second theft. XRP is 44.1 percent of that itemized total. USDT, USDC and USDT0 together are $75.48 million. SlowMist later tagged 11 EVM addresses, seven XRP Ledger addresses and one Tron address.

The rails then split. Freezable dollars and tokenized gold on Ethereum were sold for ether within 18 to 41 minutes, before the first public flag. Lookonchain said the attacker had already swapped most Ethereum-family proceeds into 67,982 ETH, about $183 million. That 67,982 ETH is the converted EVM pile, not the 31,890 ETH taken in the original drain. The XRP, by contrast, has largely stayed on its own ledger, with only a thin peel chain cashed out. Tether and Circle never froze the cluster in the window that mattered.

Eight Chains in 2 Hours 52 Minutes

Bitget dates detection to 18:31 UTC. Payments to the attacker kept clearing for 2 hours 52 minutes after that stamp, across eight chains: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Tron and the XRP Ledger. Yuzu’s reconstruction, timed in Singapore and converted here to UTC, is the clock below.

THE DRAIN WINDOW ON SEPTEMBER 24

1. 18:31 UTC: A 93 TRX test leaves a Bitget Tron wallet, and 0.84 ETH leaves the Ethereum hot wallet at nonce 3820106, one nonce after a normal user withdrawal in the same block at 2.1305 gwei. Bitget later dates detection to this second.
2. 18:58 UTC: 34.75 million USDT follows after a 28-minute pause.
3. 19:01 UTC: A 15-second wave hits Arbitrum (19.67 million USDT0), Ethereum (USDC and 3,000 XAUt), Optimism, Base and the XRP Ledger, where Bitget’s own XRP opens the attacker’s account with 2.25 million XRP.
4. 19:16 UTC: The single largest payment, 91,420,942.76 XRP, leaves Bitget 2. Parallel legs take 12,719 BNB, 821,012 AVAX, 20.59 million TRX and another ETH burst.
5. 20:28 UTC: Bitget 2 tries to send 9,142,093.8 XRP. The ledger rejects it as unfunded after an internal sweep had already moved 2 million XRP. The attacker receives nothing; the wallet pays a 0.000020 XRP fee.
6. 21:19 UTC: After a refill from Bitget 1, Bitget 2 sends another 9.31 million XRP. Two of the large XRPL payments each took about 90 percent of the source wallet.
7. 21:23 UTC: Last attacker transfer. Independent flags had started around 19:57 UTC. Chen’s first public notice lands at 21:30 UTC.

Yuzu also logged a Bitget eighth-anniversary promotional post about 29 minutes after the first test transfer, while the signer was still clearing attacker payments. On September 17, seven days earlier, Bitget had published its 46th monthly proof of reserves, a 135 percent total ratio, and expanded coverage to 19 assets including XRP, framed as an eighth-anniversary step.

The Backstop Is 5,500 Bitcoin

Chen’s unauthorized transfers at 18:31 UTC notice is the customer-facing document. It says account balances are accurate, deposits and trading remain open, and the full loss sits inside the User Protection Fund. The fund’s public page lists a 5,500 BTC protection fund, and the notice puts that pile above $464 million.

THE BITCOIN BACKSTOP

• Stated size: 5,500 BTC, valued by Bitget at over $464 million on September 24.
• Cover line: $351.6 million divided by 5,500 BTC is about $63,900 per coin, so the dollar cover moves with bitcoin.
• Addresses: Bitget says the wallets are public and can be checked on chain, and that the fund will be topped up after any payout.
• Job of the fund: It is a corporate reserve for platform incidents, not deposit insurance of the FDIC kind.

The architecture Chen cited is a three-layer wallet stack, and only part of the first two layers was hit.

BITGET’S THREE WALLET LAYERS

• Hot wallets: Internet-connected balances used for daily payouts and trading flow.
• Warm wallets: A semi-connected buffer that refills hot wallets and pulls surplus deposits off the open internet.
• Cold wallets: Offline storage. Bitget says this layer was not touched.

A payout in bitcoin against a hole that is mostly XRP and ether is a market operation, not a book entry. Restocking the XRP till means buying XRP, or paying customers in something else, after an assessment Bitget has not yet published. The fund can be larger than the loss in dollars and still leave a coin-by-coin gap until those trades settle.

Specter Ties the Stolen XRP to July’s AFX Hack

Chen said in a livestream that some IP addresses used in the attack matched VPN patterns tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, and that the match is not a confirmed attribution. She said Bitget does not treat the incident as an inside job. On-chain investigator Specter went further on X, naming Lazarus and linking the bridged XRP to the $24.15 million AFX Trade drain in July, a job already tied to TraderTraitor.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Chen’s brief: An unpublished IP and VPN pattern points to a North Korea-linked group, and she has called that link likely while saying identity is not confirmed.
• Specter’s brief: The stolen XRP was bridged and can be linked to funds from the AFX hack, which he attributes to TraderTraitor, a Lazarus-linked unit.
• The open file: No firm or law-enforcement IOC set has been published, and Bitget has promised a technical report only once the intrusion method is confirmed.

The AFX case is the cleaner historical rhyme, because it was also a signing failure rather than a broken contract. On July 22, 2026, UNC4899 / TraderTraitor hit the AFX custody bridge in July after a fake job approach led a developer to clone a malicious repository. Five hot-validator signatures met the quorum on an unapproved 24.15 million USDC withdrawal. Arbitrum’s native bridge was not touched. Trusted signing authority did the damage, which is the same family of failure Chen now describes at Bitget, even if the intrusion path is still unpublished.

Bybit Reopens the Lazarus Bounty Board

Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou posted at 03:38 UTC on September 25 that his team was on standby. Bitget had helped Bybit after the $1.5 billion hack in 2025, he wrote, and Bybit is updating its board for tracing stolen funds to help Bitget follow the coins. Chen replied, “thanx Ben, we are all in this together.”

Bybit team is standby to help in any ways that we can. Bitget helped us when we had the hack.

Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO, Bybit, on X

That is the post-Bybit script: a public fund, a paused withdrawal book, and a rival exchange offering trace support. It also marks the limit of what a bounty board can do while 67,982 ETH can still move across mixers and bridges and 102.93 million XRP sits in a small set of XRPL accounts. Zhou’s offer does not reopen Bitget withdrawals and does not, by itself, freeze the XRP.

Users Can Still Trade, but They Cannot Withdraw

Chen said several technical teams are patching systems and preparing a withdrawal restart in parallel. She will not name a window she cannot keep. Yuzu’s check of Bitget’s API on the morning of September 25 showed zero of 4,930 withdrawal routes open, with deposits still live on 3,296 routes. Trading never stopped, which is how an exchange keeps a market while it rebuilds the payout pipe.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The official loss: About $351.6 million from part of the hot and warm layers, with cold wallets described as secure.
• The method Bitget names: Spoofed backend data that triggered the normal signer; private keys ruled out.
• The XRP bag: 102,926,478 XRP at $157.48 million on Lookonchain’s list, still mostly on the XRP Ledger.
• The backstop: 5,500 BTC, over $464 million, with a promised replenishment after any payout.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Who did it: Lazarus and TraderTraitor are named by Chen as a VPN pattern and by Specter as an XRP-bridge link; neither is a closed case.
• How the backend was entered: Chen has not published the intrusion path or a third-party tool name in the English updates.
• When withdrawals return: No date, only a promise to announce a window once one is real.
• How XRP is restocked: No per-asset payout plan has been posted.

The coins that can be frozen were already ether before most of the industry was awake. The coins that cannot be frozen by Tether or Circle, the 102.93 million XRP, are the ones still sitting in attacker accounts on a public ledger. Bitget’s signer treated those payments as routine. The fund can write a dollar cheque. It cannot put those specific XRP back in the hot wallet until someone buys them, or until the attacker is squeezed into giving them up.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a cryptocurrency exchange security incident, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, trading advice, or a recommendation to keep, move or withdraw assets from any platform, and it is not legal advice about claims against an exchange or a protection fund. Readers should consult a qualified financial adviser and, if they hold a disputed balance, a lawyer licensed in their jurisdiction before acting. Figures, wallet balances, fund valuations and withdrawal status reflect the named sources as of September 25, 2026, and those facts can change as Bitget, trackers and investigators publish updates.