Hackers stole more than $350 million from Bitget. This is the largest crypto theft of the year.

Nearly $352 million was stolen from the Bitget cryptocurrency exchange—the largest theft of digital assets this year, according to the Financial Times. According to the company, the attackers’ methods “largely correspond” to those used by North Korean hackers. Bitget ranks fifth among the world’s largest crypto exchanges by spot trading volume, according to CoinMarketCap.

On the evening of September 24, the exchange discovered that $351.6 million had been stolen from customer wallets, after which it froze withdrawals, Bitget reported. User losses will be covered by the company’s User Protection Fund, which currently holds more than $464 million, the company said. Withdrawals will resume once the company “is confident it is safe to do so,” the statement said.

According to Bitget, hackers stole tokens—including Ether and XRP, as well as the stablecoins USDC and USDT—from several blockchains, including Ethereum, the XRP Ledger, and Base. “Based on the behavior of the IP addresses and analysis of blockchain data, the attack method in this incident largely corresponds to known patterns used by North Korean hacking groups,” said Bitget CEO Gracie Chen on the social media platform X.

Bitget reported that it is working with law enforcement agencies, blockchain security firms, and the organizations that manage all of the affected blockchains. According to Chen, some of them have managed to identify wallets belonging to the hackers and freeze them. She said that the attackers “compromised a critical backend system” in Bitget’s wallet infrastructure, “used it to tamper with transaction data,” and triggered “Bitget’s authorization process to withdraw funds.”

The Bitget hack was the largest cryptocurrency theft of the year. It was preceded by a series of other attacks, including the theft of $319 million worth of Bitcoin from the Liquid Network blockchain in early September and $292 million from the infrastructure used by the KelpDAO protocol in April.

According to TRM Labs, a blockchain analytics firm, a total of $1.73 billion had been stolen from crypto companies in 333 incidents since the beginning of the year, prior to the Bitget hack. North Korea “continues to lead by a wide margin in the volume of stolen crypto assets” this year, TRM Labs states in its report for the first half of 2026. The company attributes this to “state-sponsored financial operations involving sophisticated infrastructure attacks.”

In February 2025, North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion from the Bybit cryptocurrency exchange. This remains the largest cryptocurrency theft in history. The FBI stated last year: “These assets are expected to be further laundered and ultimately converted into fiat currency.”

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor