Bitget's CEO says user funds are safe. Right now, literally no user, hacked or not, can withdraw a single dollar.
The exchange confirmed $351.6M taken from hot and warm wallets on September 24, up from an initial $183M estimate as more transactions got traced. Cold wallets are untouched, CEO Gracy Chen said, and a $464M User Protection Fund covers the full loss.
Here's the gap between the statement and the reality. Withdrawals are frozen for every account on the platform, including users whose funds were never touched. Safe and accessible aren't the same thing, and only one of those is currently true.
The protection fund claim carries its own asterisk too. Its size and composition come from the company itself. Nobody has independently confirmed what's actually sitting inside it or whether it's liquid enough to make every user whole immediately once withdrawals resume.
This is the second nine-figure exchange incident this month, after Liquid Network's $320M breach two weeks ago. Attack vector still undisclosed, investigation still open.
Every exchange says user funds are safe right after a hack. The honest version of that sentence usually takes a few more days to write.