But we do have a lot more money from our company's capital. I can't tell you the exact number, but it's for sure more than one billion.
Last week, one of the biggest crypto exchange hacks of this year happened, and unfortunately this time to Bitget. Around $387 million were stolen from the exchange. The exchange has been slowly reopening their withdrawals, and they have responded by compensating the amount from their user protection fund. But is Bitget safe to use for the more than 100 million users that are registered to the platform right now? We are today joining Bitget CEO Gracy Chen. Gracy, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. It's a difficult moment for the company, as I presume.
Thank you for having me. And actually, today is Thursday, so most of the withdrawals have already started. I would say the most difficult time has passed, so it's not that difficult at the moment, and we are all focusing on recovery, on better serving the users who chose to stay or who chose to leave. But in general, I would say the crisis itself has already sort of passed.
Great. And yeah, but I just want to get it out of the way that from a crypto perspective, it is commendable how you guys have responded, how quickly you did all the live streams on that day when the attack broke out. But there are questions that users really want to know. Well, the first thing is, how much of it is currently being recovered? How much do you think recovery is possible at this stage?
Yeah, the recovery at this stage is quite slow, and even just freezing the stolen funds is slow. So we actually published an online dashboard that keeps track of all the on-chain data. And I think the last time I checked, around a few hours ago, the total amount of frozen funds, with help from a lot of organizations in this industry, is only about 1 million. So that's a very small number compared with the 388 million that was stolen from us.
I see. Yes, that's a very, very fractional amount. And I believe that one of the biggest disputes — not just you, but the overall industry — has had with Thorchain is that they have publicly refused to freeze or interfere in any of the funds that the hackers are very publicly trying to funnel through the system. Do you think that these attacks keep happening on exchanges because of the lack of collaboration from services like Thorchain?
I don't think hacks happen mainly because of Thorchain, obviously. But yes, some DeFi protocols — well, all the protocols or all the public chains work very differently. They have very different architecture, governance structure, and technical capabilities. I fully respect the permissionless design of a protocol such as Thorchain. At the same time, I also believe that there is an important distinction between permissionless infrastructure and facilitating the movement of stolen funds. For example, those who may have looked at my Twitter might be aware that I also shared about what NEAR as a protocol did with, for example, NEAR Intents and Shield — that's their intelligent sort of system that is built on top of the permissionless NEAR protocol, and that is to identify the flows associated with incidents where their infrastructure allowed it. So I'm not asking Thorchain or some other protocols to do something technically impossible. We do want to understand what is technically and governance-wise possible, and hopefully we can work together and develop some approaches to at least make it very hard for the hackers to launder any money. And again, this is an industry-wide problem. Exchanges, protocols, security providers, and law enforcement all need better mechanisms for rapid information sharing, for tracing, for recovery. So yeah, back to your question: I'm not blaming Thorchain for sure. It's us that we should blame, or the hackers that we should blame. But I do hope that many protocols can work together with us and with any victims in this industry to build something that just makes it very hard for the hackers.
Let's get back to the hack itself. Your hot wallets were compromised, which necessarily means user funds — in a general sense, these were user funds that were withdrawn into different hacking accounts. I know that you have compensated that from your user protection fund, which was more than 400 million, which is great. But there is a bigger concern: what if the hack was much larger than that? What if, like Bybit earlier, they lost more than 1 billion? So are you going to increase the user protection fund? Are there any plans regarding that?
Okay, yeah. So the user protection fund — the Bitget protection fund — was more than 416 million before the incident. We did already use some bitcoins from the protection fund, moved them to our hot wallets to deal with our users' withdrawals. And we've already replenished the Bitget protection fund back to 300 million, about around yesterday, about 24 hours ago. And I also published that information on my Twitter. So right now, the Bitget protection fund is more than 300 million. It's not at the same level of 460 million as it was before, but right now 300 million is, in our opinion, a fair enough number. And that's actually the threshold that we made, or a promise that we made to the industry after we established the protection fund, that we want to maintain it to a certain level, because it's also in open wallets, our users get to check by themselves. So right now it's sitting in three different wallets, consisting mainly of bitcoin, and maintaining more than 300 million. So we've done that — you know, used the protection fund, replenished the protection fund already. And I think for the moment, for the current stage, maybe we will not just, you know, move it further higher or too high from the current stage, but 300 million is a fair enough threshold.
Yeah, but what happens if — like, users are genuinely asking — what happens if the next hack is much costlier? Does Bitget have the ability to handle that kind of financial blow in the future? If that happens again — I hope it doesn't, but it happens more often than not to crypto exchanges.
You mean if in the future there's another 300, 400 million sort of hack?
More than the amount in the user protection fund. What happens then?
