Bitget Recovery Bounty Targets $351.6M in Stolen Funds
Bitget has launched a recovery bounty programme after a wallet-service attack reportedly caused about $351.6 million in losses. The Bitget recovery bounty offers a 5% reward for directly helping freeze stolen funds and another 5% for funds successfully recovered, potentially providing a total reward of up to 10%. Eligible participants include cryptocurrency exchanges, blockchain investigators, security researchers and other on-chain specialists. Court orders, law-enforcement actions and other compulsory legal procedures do not qualify. Bitget will decide eligibility, contribution attribution and final payouts. Circle and Tether have frozen 99,990 USDC and 218,023 USDT linked to the attack, worth about $318,000 combined. Bitget said attackers compromised its wallet-service backend, falsified transaction information and triggered an authorisation-signing process, while ruling out a private-key leak. The exchange will also use Bybit’s Lazarus Bounty programme to support recovery efforts. The Bitget recovery bounty may improve cross-industry fund tracing, but it does not guarantee recovery. Traders should monitor wallet movements, stablecoin freezes, withdrawals and evidence of further losses. The event is primarily a security and operational development, with a neutral direct price impact unless contagion or new losses emerge.
Neutral
The incident is negative for Bitget’s security reputation and could temporarily increase concerns about exchange risk, but the reported losses and recovery effort do not directly change the supply, demand or utility of Bitget-related tokens. In the short term, traders may react to new wallet movements, asset freezes, withdrawal restrictions or evidence of additional losses. Such developments could create volatility and risk-off sentiment around Bitget and exchange-linked assets. However, the bounty programme, cooperation with Circle, Tether, Bybit and investigators, and the freezing of some funds may limit further damage and support confidence in recovery efforts. In the longer term, successful recovery could improve sentiment, while a larger confirmed loss or evidence of systemic controls failing could weigh on prices. With no confirmed market-wide contagion, the direct price impact remains neutral.