Customers withdrew more than 4,000 bitcoins, worth over $334 million at current prices, in the first hour after Bitget resumed withdrawals following a $388 million hack, the exchange's CEO said.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday that outflows have since stabilized. "The withdrawals actually stabilized a lot today," Chen said. "Those hundreds of millions [in bitcoin withdrawals] actually most of them happen on the first hour of the withdrawal restart."

Hackers drained $388 million in crypto last week after compromising hot wallets at the Victoria, Seychelles-based exchange. In a Monday post on X, Chen said the platform processed 9,585 withdrawal orders totaling 4,098 bitcoins. The exchange is releasing customer funds in phases.

Bitget froze withdrawals after blockchain analysts flagged unusual outflows from the platform. The company later stated that the attack method was "highly consistent with known patterns of North Korean hacker organizations."

Chen said attackers did not touch cold storage funds. Instead, they "exploited vulnerabilities from third-party products to steal internal credentials, then used those credentials to send fraudulent withdrawal commands that bypassed our risk controls."

The breach put direct pressure on Bitget's insurance-style protection fund, which stood at $464 million before the hack. Bloomberg reported the fund has since fallen below $200 million. Chen said the company is using its own capital to replenish it.

Bitget characterized the incident as its first "security incident of this nature in eight years." In a support notice, the exchange said the situation is under control: "The incident remains contained, and no further unauthorized transfers are possible."

The operational fallout lands on one of the largest centralized venues by volume. Bitget ranks sixth globally by trading volume, according to CoinGecko, with $811 million processed over the past 24 hours. Its customer base is concentrated in Asia.

The incident fits a long-established pattern. Attackers linked to North Korea's government have repeatedly targeted cryptocurrency exchanges and rank among the most sophisticated cybercriminal groups tracking the sector.

The episode also raises broader questions about third-party dependency risk at centralized exchanges. Bitget's own account of the breach points not to a failure of its custody architecture but to compromised credentials obtained through vulnerabilities in external products — a vector that bypassed internal risk controls entirely.

For now, the immediate liquidity test appears to have passed. The one-hour surge of more than $334 million in bitcoin withdrawals has given way to what Chen describes as normalized outflows, and the phased withdrawal schedule gives the exchange room to manage residual demand.

The longer-term test is reputational and structural. Rebuilding the protection fund above its pre-hack $464 million level, maintaining volume through a customer-confidence shock, and demonstrating that the credential-theft vector has been closed will determine whether Bitget retains its top-six ranking in the months ahead.