Gracy Chen Compares Bitget Hack Recovery Efforts With…

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen has warned that the crypto exchange may be unable to fully freeze or recover the approximately $388 million in digital assets taken during a security breach last week, tempering expectations for how much of the haul can be returned.

Chen used the February 2025 Bybit hack as a benchmark for what recovery efforts look like in practice. Attackers took around $1.5 billion worth of Ether from Bybit, yet only a fraction was later frozen or retrieved. "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," she said. "That's only the freezing. It's not about recovery yet."

Partial freezes and a bounty programme

Some third parties have already moved to restrict assets tied to the breach. NEAR Intents said it blocked more than $50 million in connected assets and froze roughly $500,000. Chen also confirmed that stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle blacklisted a wallet linked to the exploit, freezing about $318,013 in USDT and USDC. Those amounts remain small relative to the total loss.

Bitget has launched a bounty programme that pays 5% of frozen funds and 5% of recovered funds to parties that help identify or retrieve stolen assets.

On attribution, Chen said investigators are still working to determine who was behind the attack. North Korea-linked actors were among the possibilities examined shortly after the incident, based on similarities with known attack patterns and infrastructure indicators. An internal compromise was not ruled out at first, but Chen later said preliminary findings had eliminated that scenario. "This is a very complicated matter that we need to do a lot of investigation and quite thoroughly investigation," she said, adding that the conclusion was based on preliminary results.

Bitget has begun restoring withdrawals in stages after temporarily suspending some services, with Bitcoin withdrawals resuming first, followed by Ether. The exchange initially reported a $352 million loss before revising the figure to roughly $388 million after reviewing additional transfers linked to the incident.

The outcome of the recovery effort is likely to hinge on where the stolen assets move next. Funds sent to centralized exchanges or platforms with compliance procedures can be easier to restrict, while assets routed through decentralized systems are considerably harder to retrieve — a pattern that has played out across a string of large crypto breaches in recent years and keeps attention on exchange wallet management and security controls.