Bitget's CEO Puts Little Faith in Clawing Back Its $388M Hack Loss
Gracy Chen points to Bybit's 2025 breach as the realistic benchmark, where roughly 3.5% of stolen assets were frozen and even less came back.
Illustration · generated, not a photograph
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen expects little of the $388 million taken from her exchange to come back. In an appearance on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction published Tuesday, she said she was not "very optimistic" about freezing or recovering the funds lost in last week's breach, per Cointelegraph.
"I'm actually not very optimistic because after a year or so of Bybit's hack, they've only [been able to freeze] about 3.5% of the total stolen funds," Chen said. "That's only the freezing. It's not about recovery yet."
That earlier case, when roughly $1.5 billion in ether was drained from Bybit in February 2025, is the yardstick she is using. It produced about $80 million in combined freezing and recovery — a small fraction of the total.
Bitget has responded to the incident with a bounty, offering 5% of any funds frozen and 5% of any funds recovered. Outside parties have contributed what they can. NEAR Intents' team said Monday it had blocked more than $50 million in assets connected to the attack and froze about $500,000. Chen also confirmed that Tether and Circle blacklisted one wallet tied to the exploit, freezing $318,013 in USDT and USDC.
The exchange first said it had halted withdrawals after $352 million in digital assets were taken in a Thursday attack. Chen later revised the figure to about $388 million, describing the update as a "more complete accounting of transfers." Withdrawals have been turned back on in phases, beginning with Bitcoin on Monday and followed by ether on Tuesday.
On the question of who was responsible, Chen said in the immediate aftermath that North Korea might be behind it, citing "IP addresses that match the VPN choices by a certain [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] group." She did not, however, rule out the possibility of insider involvement.
The size of the Bitget loss places it among 2026's biggest crypto incidents, following a $320 million exploit of the Liquid Network in September. Larger breaches remain in the historical record: the $1.5 billion Bybit hack, the $615 million Ronin Bridge attack in 2022, and the $611 million Poly Network exploit in 2021.
Source reporting
The outlets whose reporting this account was written from.
Written from the reporting and primary documents credited at the foot of this story. Facts are credited to the outlet or document that established them. How Chainpress works
