Bitget crypto exchange hit by $350mn hack

Nearly $352mn has been stolen from crypto exchange Bitget in the single biggest digital assets theft this year, using what the firm said were methods “highly consistent” with North Korean hackers.

Bitget chief executive Gracy Chen said the exchange’s systems had detected at 6.31pm GMT on Thursday that $351.6mn had been stolen from its customers’ wallets and that the company had subsequently frozen customer withdrawals.

She said the stolen funds would be covered by Bitget’s User Protection Fund, which currently holds more than $464mn, and withdrawals would be allowed “once we confirm it’s safe to resume”.

Sharp rises in digital asset prices in recent years have made crypto companies lucrative targets for cybercriminals, who have successfully drained billions of dollars’ worth of tokens from their systems.

Blockchain analysis group TRM Labs said this year that North Korea “remained by far the largest source of stolen value”, describing “state-directed financial operations involving sophisticated infrastructure compromises”.

Chen said that “based on IP behaviour patterns and on-chain analysis, the attack method in this incident is highly consistent with known patterns of North Korean hacker organisations”.

In February 2025, North Korean hackers drained $1.5bn from Bybit, another crypto exchange, in the biggest ever single crypto hack. The FBI said last year that “it is expected these assets will be further laundered and eventually converted to fiat currency”.

The theft from Bitget is the largest crypto hack so far this year and follows a slew of others, including $319mn worth of bitcoin that was stolen from blockchain Liquid Network in early September and $292mn that was stolen from infrastructure used by protocol KelpDAO in April.

Before the Bitget hack, $1.73bn had been stolen across 333 incidents at crypto groups so far in 2026, according to TRM Labs.

Bitget was founded in 2018 and is the world’s fifth largest exchange by spot trading volumes, according to CoinMarketCap.

The hackers stole tokens including ether and XRP and stablecoins USDC and USDT from blockchains including Ethereum, XRP Ledger and Base. Bitget said it was working with law enforcement and blockchain security groups, as well as the groups that run all the affected blockchains, some of which Chen said had identified wallets belonging to the hackers and frozen them.

She said the attackers “compromised a critical back-end system within our wallet infrastructure, used it to spoof transaction data, and triggered our authorisation process to move funds out”.

As well as stealing funds directly, cybercriminals are increasingly targeting the personal data of crypto holders, aiming either to sell it on or to get paid not to do so. Criminals claiming to be behind a data breach at online bank Revolut last week threatened to sell the confidential records of hundreds of customers to other criminal groups unless the British company paid a $3mn ransom.