Crypto exchange Bitget said on Thursday that roughly $351.6 had been exposed to a system breach, with Chief Executive Gracy Chen announcing the incident in a post on X shortly after independent blockchain researchers flagged unusual wallet movements tied to the platform.

In the post, Chen said Bitget's cold wallets and user funds were safe, while acknowledging "unauthorized transfers from some of our hot wallets." She added that the exchange maintains a "user protection fund" holding more than $464 million.

"Cold wallets remain fully secure. Bitget operates a three-tier wallet architecture — the breach contained only a portion of the hot wallet and warm wallet layers," Chen said.

Deposits and trading remain online, but the exchange is "temporarily" pausing withdrawals until it completes a security review, according to Chen, who promised the company would publish an incident report within 24 hours. Suspending withdrawals is a standard containment step for exchanges investigating a breach, though it leaves users unable to move assets off the platform until the review concludes. The immediate markers to watch are the content of that promised report, any further movement of the funds, and when withdrawals are restored.

Onchain data and independent researchers had earlier flagged unusual wallet movements, initially reporting that around $183 million in digital assets had moved from wallets labeled as belonging to the exchange.

Emmett Gallic, an analyst at blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence, said in an X post that the transactions involved three Bitget hot wallets and one cold wallet across multiple blockchains, with the funds consolidated into a single address. The assets included ETH, BNB, AVAX and USDT0, according to his analysis. Funneling everything into one address leaves a fixed, publicly visible trail that analytics firms and the exchange can monitor going forward.

"Looks like Bitget just got hacked for $178M," he wrote, noting in a separate post that more funds were on the move.

Hot wallets remain connected to the systems used to process transactions and withdrawals, making them more accessible than cold wallets, which are designed to keep signing credentials isolated from internet-connected infrastructure.

A loss of up to $351.6 million would make the incident potentially the biggest crypto hack of 2026. September has proven especially difficult for the sector: earlier this month, the Liquid Network lost $320 million in another hack, though the attackers there claimed to be "white hat hackers." For scale, the roughly $1.5 billion theft from Bybit in February 2025 stands as the largest crypto exchange hack on record.

Bitget's native token, BGB, fell sharply as news of the hack spread, though it had recovered somewhat by 22:10 UTC. The token was down 2.9% as of press time. Over the past 24 hours of trading, Bitcoin's price slipped about 0.29%, while ether declined 0.2%.

This report was first published by CoinDesk on Sept. 24, 2026, and updated at 22:05 UTC to clarify language surrounding the exploit and at 22:10 UTC to add market reaction. The original article is available here.