Bitget's Hack Just Hit $387.5M — And They're Still Counting
Bitget has revised its hack estimate up to $387.5 million — and the number is still climbing as the exchange adds Zcash and TRON assets to its damage assessment.
Withdrawals remain paused. XRP and Ether dominate the identified outflows. And every new accounting update is widening the hole, not closing it.
That last detail is the one that should worry you.
When an exchange keeps revising a hack estimate upward, it signals one of two things: the attacker's reach was broader than anyone initially understood, or the internal controls were loose enough that nobody had a clean picture of what was moving where. Neither answer inspires confidence.
The inclusion of Zcash in the updated accounting adds a layer of concern that goes beyond raw dollar figures. Zcash's privacy features make tracing stolen funds significantly harder than with transparent chains like Ethereum or XRP Ledger. If a meaningful portion of the haul moved through shielded Zcash transactions, recovery becomes close to theoretical.
TRON's addition to the tally is its own red flag. TRON has historically been a preferred rail for moving large sums quickly across exchanges, particularly in USDT. Its presence in the outflow list suggests the attacker, or attackers, were sophisticated enough to diversify exit routes across multiple chains simultaneously.
Bitget has not yet confirmed how the breach occurred, which means traders have no way to assess whether the vulnerability has been fully patched. That uncertainty, combined with frozen withdrawals, is the kind of environment that historically triggers secondary panic: users on other exchanges pulling funds to cold storage, liquidity thinning across mid-cap pairs, and cascading pressure on tokens that already have shallow order books.
XRP holders should pay particular attention here. Being named as a dominant outflow asset in a hack of this scale rarely moves price in a clean direction. Forced selling of recovered or seized assets, legal proceedings, and general headline risk can create unpredictable volatility for weeks after the initial incident.
What to watch: Monitor Bitget's official communications for a third estimate revision, which would confirm the accounting is still not under control. Watch on-chain data for large XRP and ETH movements tied to known Bitget wallets. If withdrawals remain frozen past 72 hours, expect user sentiment to deteriorate fast and spread beyond Bitget's own user base.
The number was $387.5 million today. The real question is what it looks like tomorrow morning.