Bitget Hack: Why XRP Holders Couldn't Withdraw for 8 Days

On September 24, Bitget, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, lost more than $350 million from its hot wallet. The biggest single item was XRP: around 103 million coins, worth about $157 million. Ethereum, Tether and Zcash were also taken.

Bitget said within hours that user funds were safe, and that turned out to be true. But XRP holders on the exchange could see every coin they owned and could not move any of them for eight days. The video argues that this gap, between funds being safe and funds being reachable, is the real lesson for anyone keeping crypto on an exchange.

What happened at Bitget?

Attackers drained Bitget’s hot wallet, the online wallet an exchange keeps topped up so customers can withdraw whenever they want. By the time the outflow was stopped, more than $350 million was gone.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said user funds were safe and that the loss was covered by a protection fund holding over $464 million. According to the video, that holds up: no one’s balance on Bitget went down.

The same announcement paused withdrawals. Two days later, Bitget published its reopening schedule:

1. Bitcoin first, on September 28.
2. Then Ethereum.
3. Then USDC.
4. XRP in the final batch with the remaining assets, on October 2.

That left XRP holders eight days where they could see their coins and could not send them anywhere. The video compares it to a bank telling you your money is safe while every ATM in town is out of service.

Bitget does not accept US customers, so many readers were never affected. The video’s point is that every exchange runs on the same promise, and this showed what that promise does and does not cover.

How did the hackers get in without private keys?

They used the exchange’s own approval system. Bitget says its private keys were never stolen. According to Chen, the attackers got into a system inside the exchange’s wallet setup, faked the transaction data and set off Bitget’s own approval process to send the money out.

In plain terms, the exchange’s security system signed off on the theft. The security team was guarding the vault door, and the attack went through the system that decides who gets let through. Chen said her team suspects North Korea based on the patterns it found, though that has not been confirmed. Mandiant, Google’s security firm, is working on the case, according to the video.

Why can’t the stolen XRP be frozen?

Because XRP itself cannot be frozen. The video explains that freeze tools on the XRP Ledger only work on tokens a company issues on top of the ledger, such as a stablecoin. They do not work on XRP.

That difference played out in public:

• Circle and Tether froze around $320,000 of the stolen stablecoins.
• The hackers split the XRP across five wallets, four of them holding 20 million each. It barely moved for a day and a half.
• On September 26, around 54 million XRP, worth about $83 million, left those wallets within a few hours and was spread across more addresses, in full view of anyone tracking it.

Bitget’s best hope is catching the hacker when they try to cash out at another exchange. It is offering a 5% reward to anyone who helps freeze the funds and another 5% for helping recover them.

Critics may say this proves XRP is unsafe. The video’s view is that the same property cuts both ways: once XRP leaves, nobody can drag it back, and nobody can freeze XRP held in a wallet you control, whether a company, a government or an exchange having a bad week. The ledger worked as designed. The exchange holding the coins was what failed.

Was Bitget an isolated case?

No. According to the video, it was the fifth exchange-related incident that month:

Date	Event (per the video)
September 6	The Liquid Network, a Bitcoin side network exchanges use to move Bitcoin between each other, was exploited for around $320 million. Most of it came back only because those who took it chose to return it.
September 15	An exchange running since 2017 announced it is closing. Customers have until December 22 to withdraw.
September 21	Coinbase went down for about 70 minutes on the day Bitcoin broke $85,000 for the first time in eight months.
September 23	BitMEX, the exchange that pioneered the leveraged contracts most crypto traders use, shut down trading after 11 years. It never lost customer money to a hack.
September 24	Bitget was drained.

The video cites CryptoSlate counting more than $684 million lost to crypto hacks in September, before Bitget raised its own figure, making it the worst month of 2026.

Why the Coinbase outage matters to XRP holders

Nobody hacked Coinbase, but customers still could not buy, sell, trade or even see their balances for about 70 minutes. Coinbase’s status message ended with almost the same reassurance Bitget gave three days later: your funds are safe.

The video’s point is about timing. Both times, the people the message was meant for could not reach their money, and Coinbase’s outage landed on the best day the market had seen in eight months, exactly when some holders would want to take profit. Your coins being safe and your coins being yours to move are two different things.

Watch for scams that follow exchange trouble

Every time an exchange has a bad day, scams follow. The video describes two patterns:

• Recycled fake-hack videos. Old clips with headlines like “thousands of investors wiped out during Coinbase hack” get passed around again. The example shown came out in October of last year, and 20 seconds in, the creator admits Coinbase was not hacked.
• Fake support accounts and emails. They offer to help you move your coins somewhere safe, often from addresses with a subtle misspelling, such as a capital “I” in place of a lowercase “l.”

Both are fishing for a panicked holder who acts first and verifies second. Two rules from the video: no real exchange will ever message you first, and nobody legitimate ever needs your recovery phrase. If you are a Bitget customer, get updates only from Bitget’s official channels.

The exchange plan from the video

The video argues that holding a coin on an exchange is really two bets: one on the coin and one on the exchange. Its suggested plan is written while you are calm, before an exchange you use has a problem:

1. Keep coins you plan to hold long term in a wallet you control.
2. Decide in advance the prices at which you would take some profit.
3. When a price is reached, move only the amount you are selling onto the exchange.
4. Sell, then move the money straight back out. A Bitcoin educator quoted in the video describes the whole round trip as taking about 15 minutes.
5. Decide where the proceeds go, such as dollars or stablecoins, before you sell.

The video notes that moving coins off an exchange takes about an afternoon, and that most people simply never get around to it.

What to watch next

If you hold crypto on any exchange, check two things: whether your setup depends on that exchange being open on the day you need it, and whether you could tell a real support message from a fake one. Follow the stolen XRP and any recovery news through Bitget’s official channels, and treat any unsolicited message about “moving your funds to safety” as a scam until proven otherwise.