The CEO of crypto exchange Bitget says she is not confident the company can fully freeze or recover the roughly $388 million in cryptocurrency stolen in a security breach last week, one of the largest attacks to hit the industry so far in 2026.

Speaking on Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction podcast, released Tuesday, in an interview with Cointelegraph’s Ciaran Lyons, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said she was treating the February 2025 hack of crypto exchange Bybit as a “good reference point” for Thursday’s breach. Hackers stole approximately $1.5 billion worth of Ether (ETH) from Bybit, and the company reported freezing and recovering only a combined $80 million.

“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,” said Chen. “That’s only the freezing. It’s not about recovery yet.”

In response to the incident, Bitget launched a bounty program offering 5% of any funds frozen and 5% of funds recovered. Several companies have already stepped in to help mitigate user losses. The team behind NEAR Intents reported on Monday that it had blocked more than $50 million in assets tied to the attack and froze about $500,000. Chen also confirmed that stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle blacklisted a wallet linked to the exploit, freezing $318,013 in USDt (USDT) and USDC (USDC). Even combined, the frozen totals remain a small fraction of the roughly $388 million taken, consistent with the gradual pace Chen described when citing Bybit’s experience.

The breach ranks among the largest to affect the crypto industry in 2026, coming after a $320 million exploit of the Liquid Network in September. The sector’s most significant incidents to date include Bybit’s 2025 hack, the $615 million Ronin Bridge exploit in 2022 and the $611 million Poly Network hack in 2021.

Bitget initially reported that the exchange had suspended withdrawals following the loss of $352 million in digital assets in Thursday’s attack. Chen later updated the incident report to reflect a “more complete accounting of transfers,” saying that about $388 million had been lost.

Who’s responsible for the attack?

Chen also discussed who may be behind the security breach. She said immediately after the attack that North Korea may have been responsible, based on “IP addresses that match the VPN choices by a certain [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] group,” while adding that Bitget had not “totally ruled out” the possibility of an inside job.

“This is a very complicated matter that we need to do a lot of investigation and quite thoroughly [sic] investigation,” she said. “It’s more based on our preliminary results of the investigation, we have ruled out that possibility.”

The exchange has begun resuming withdrawals for users in stages, starting with Bitcoin (BTC) transactions on Monday and continuing with ETH on Tuesday. With the investigation at a preliminary stage and a 5% bounty on offer for frozen or recovered funds, further stages of the withdrawal resumption and any additional freezes of stolen funds are the main developments to watch.