Invest2 publishers3 min readPublished Updated
Gracy Chen measures Bitget's odds of recovering $388 million against Bybit's 3.5%
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen expects to recover little of the $388 million stolen from the exchange, citing Bybit's 3.5% freeze rate. On that benchmark about $13.6 million is frozen within a year and roughly $374 million stays with whoever carries the loss.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Bitget first reported a $352 million loss after last Thursday's attack, and Chen later raised the figure to $388 million after a fuller count of transfers.
- Freezes tied to the attack total about $818,000 so far: roughly $500,000 held by NEAR Intents and $318,013 in stablecoins blacklisted by Tether and Circle.
- Drift Foundation's September 30 update restated its aim to reclaim roughly $295.4 million taken on April 1 through freezes, a bounty or other means, with little returned.
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Why it matters
- contradiction Chen picked the low end of her own example: Bybit's totals imply 5.3%, and the gap between the two benchmarks is worth about $7 million on Bitget's loss.
- cost Bitget's 5% bounty on frozen and recovered funds would cost it roughly $680,000 at Chen's rate and about $1 million at Bybit's own figures.
- constraint The $3.9 million in ZEC that linked wallets moved into Zcash's Ironwood shielded pool is out of reach of the issuer blacklists and router blocks behind every Bitget freeze so far.
- exposure Whether Bitget users bear any of this turns on whether the exchange absorbs the loss, and Cryptopolitan's report does not say whether it has covered their balances.
Chen said on September 29 that she was not very optimistic, because a year or so after Bybit's hack it had been able to freeze only about 3.5% of the total stolen funds, and she called Bybit's February 2025 theft a "good reference point" [8][7]. Her percentage is smaller than her example. Bybit's $80 million recovered or frozen, set against $1.5 billion taken, is 5.3% [1]. At 3.5%, the figure would be about $52.5 million [2]. Cryptopolitan, which reported the remarks, notes that freezing is not the same as recovery [17], and the gap between the two numbers may be that distinction.
Applied to Bitget's $388 million, the two rates give about $13.6 million [3] or $20.7 million [4]. Freezes reported so far, according to Cryptopolitan, come to about 0.2% of the loss [5].
Drift shows what the first six months look like. Its loss was pegged at $285 million, more than half the protocol's total value [13], while the foundation's latest update cites $295.4 million [12], a $10.4 million difference [11]. The attackers spent about six months posing as a quantitative trading firm, met Drift contributors face to face and deposited over $1 million before the theft [14]. The money sat largely untouched through the spring. Then a wallet tagged "Drift Exploiter 4" sent 23,095.1 ETH, about $44.4 million, to Tornado Cash on July 23 and 24 [15]. That was roughly 15% of the stolen total, 113 days after the hack [7][14]. ZachXBT has stopped tracking the funds; he said the task was "difficult for a team and not feasible for a single person" [16]. At Bybit, chief executive Ben Zhou said almost 28% of the money, about $420 million, had gone dark by April 2025 through mixers and cross-chain bridges [10][8].
Bitget could still beat both benchmarks. NEAR Intents blocked over $50 million linked to the attack [4], or 12.9% of the loss [6]. If that money turns out to be held and claimable, Bitget's early rate is already more than twice Bybit's 5.3% [15]. The other route is a court. Bybit sued North Korea, its Reconnaissance General Bureau and the Lazarus Group in US federal court and won a preliminary injunction to freeze identified assets [11].
I'd expect Bitget's frozen total a year from now to sit nearer Chen's $13.6 million than NEAR's $50 million. Drift's funds reached a mixer in under four months, and a popular independent investigator has since stopped following them [14][16]. The counter-case is speed: a NEAR team and two stablecoin issuers acted against Bitget-linked funds within about a week of the attack [2][4][5]. The view is wrong if confirmed freezes pass $20.7 million, the top of the range Bybit's own figures allow [4].
What to watch
- What happens to the $50 million-plus NEAR Intents blocked: returned to Bitget, held under a freeze, or simply turned away.
- Whether Bitget follows Bybit into US federal court to seek an injunction against identified assets.