Bitget Greater China Head Xie Jiayin Thanks Binance for Collaboration, Claims $460 Million Fund Fully Covers Users
Bitget Greater China Head Xie Jiayin expressed gratitude for Binance's collaboration, stating that user funds are not at risk. The existing user protection fund of approximately $460 million is sufficient to fully cover the current gap, and investigations have been launched in conjunction with Mandiant and SlowMist.
The incident involves multiple cryptocurrencies and networks, rather than a single asset being stolen. The platform has temporarily suspended withdrawals, which will resume immediately after risk is mitigated. Deposit, trading, and reward functions remain operational. The company emphasized that cold wallets and the vast majority of platform assets are unaffected, as the self-custody Bitget Wallet is separated from the exchange's infrastructure and is not involved in this hot wallet and warm wallet incident.
The protection fund is stored in approximately 5,500 bitcoins in a publicly verifiable address, exceeding the previously announced affected amount of about $351.6 million. Binance's co-CEO has previously stated that the security team has been sharing intelligence and assisting in asset recovery since the discovery. Third-party evidence collection has involved Mandiant, aiming to elevate the internal emergency response to a judicial and on-chain verification that can be delivered externally.
Xie summarized the handling principles as not shirking responsibility, not evading, and not delaying, and apologized for the withdrawal interruptions caused by the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday. Investigation focuses include the entry points of the intrusion, how forged authorizations triggered the withdrawal process, and the freezing window of funds after cross-chain splitting.
From a market mechanism perspective, this is a standard action of fulfilling promises to hedge against a run: sellers are short-term funds worried about withdrawal gates and turning to other platforms; buyers are existing users accepting the coverage of the protection fund and continuing to trade within the platform. Funds diverted from the hot wallet to the attack address spread across multiple chains, while the protection fund advances the exchange's own reserves as user assets on the balance sheet. Beneficiaries are users who can still trade and whose balances are guaranteed in writing; those under pressure are market makers and arbitrageurs relying on immediate withdrawals. The holiday suspension of withdrawals has lengthened the liquidity mismatch time and provided several hours to days for on-chain asset recovery.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Xie Jiayin is responsible for communication in Bitget's Greater China region, and this statement puts Binance's collaboration, the protection fund figures, and the two external verification agencies on the table at once. Mandiant comes from traditional cyber forensics, while SlowMist specializes in on-chain tracking in the Chinese region, and this combination is aimed at addressing two types of regulation and two user communities simultaneously. Gracy Chen had previously ruled out private key theft and characterized backend forged transaction data, while Xie added the reason for the inability to restart withdrawals on a single chain due to the "multi-currency, multi-chain" aspect.
The capital path is the contingent liability of reserve assets. The 5,500 bitcoin fund was publicly available on-chain before the attack and was immediately announced as the payout pool after the incident, effectively turning the inventory BTC into immediate insurance for users. The introduction of external verification is to ensure that insurance payouts are not interpreted as internal accounting games. Binance shares intelligence to slow down the speed at which stolen assets enter mainstream deposit channels from the attack address. The strategic motive is to preserve the platform's internal trading during the Mid-Autumn trading peak, using time to exchange for freezing and tagging, rather than pausing trading for a safety narrative.
Similar scripts were seen in the urgent emphasis on reserves by various exchanges before the FTX collapse, and the protection fund and industry joint defense after the Bybit theft. The current stage is for centralized exchanges to write "hot wallets can be forged" as an insurable event rather than a bankruptcy event. Users who still consider withdrawal timeliness as a core product are under pressure; those who accept balance accounting and delayed withdrawals have transferred the risk to the bitcoin in the fund.
The structural judgment belongs to capital concentration. A single loss of $350 million in a hot wallet is no longer borne by users but is absorbed in one go by the pre-concentrated BTC reserves. The mechanism is: the exchange first makes the excess reserves into a visible fund, then converts it into rigid payouts during the incident, thereby shifting the run from the withdrawal queue to the price fluctuations of reserve assets. Pricing power temporarily shifts from "can funds be withdrawn immediately" to "is the fund's market value still greater than the gap."
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
The protection fund is an advance written as an insurance policy.
Multi-chain theft makes withdrawal suspension cheaper than trading suspension.
External verification buys the credibility of the payout narrative.