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News · Sep 25, 2026 · 4 min read

Bitcoin today: Bitget's $351.6 million hack, and yields at a 19-year high

An exchange lost hot-wallet funds it says its own reserves cover in full. A bond market sell-off pushed borrowing costs to a level not seen since before the financial crisis. Bitcoin drifted lower through both, cooling out of extreme greed without breaking anything.

A heavy steel bank vault door standing ajar, dim light spilling from the vault room beyond

Bitget confirms $351.6 million stolen from its hot wallets

Bitget detected unauthorised transfers from its hot and warm wallets at 18:31 UTC on 24 September and confirmed within hours that $351.6 million had been drained, up sharply from the roughly $170–183 million independent researchers first flagged. Withdrawals were frozen while the exchange carried out a security review; deposits and trading stayed online.

Chief executive Gracy Chen said cold wallets were untouched and that the loss falls entirely within Bitget's User Protection Fund, which she said holds over $464 million. She declined to name an attack vector before the investigation finished. According to CoinDesk, the stolen assets were mostly ether, stablecoins, AVAX, BNB and tokenised gold rather than bitcoin, and researchers tracked the attacker consolidating them across chains before swapping the freezable stablecoins into ether.

It is the largest single crypto theft of the month: CryptoSlate put September's total exploit losses above $684 million once the Bitget figure is added, ahead of April's $646.9 million, making it the costliest month for crypto hacks so far in 2026. The full story, and what it says about exchange custody, is here.

The 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest level since July 2007

The US 10-year yield touched 5.13% on 23 September, a level last seen before the 2007–08 financial crisis, after Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr said further rate increases might be needed to bring inflation back to target. The move followed S&P Global data showing business activity growing at its fastest pace since July 2021, alongside input costs at their highest since October 2022, largely on higher fuel and transport prices (Hokanews; Investing.com).

Higher yields make cash and bonds more competitive with every other asset, bitcoin included, and the timing lines up with the two days it has just had: down from $86,607.63 at Wednesday's close to $84,384.61 as of writing, with $131.1 million of leveraged longs forced out on 23 September against $33.4 million of shorts, the biggest liquidation imbalance of the week on our liquidations chart.

The Fed opened comment on stablecoin rules under the GENIUS Act

The Federal Reserve Board asked for public comment on two proposals for Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers: one setting reserve and capital requirements — full backing in cash and short-term Treasury bills, redemption within two business days — and one laying out how banks apply for stablecoin authority and how the assets backing the tokens are safeguarded, according to the Fed's own release. Both proposals carry 60-day comment periods.

It is a rulebook for dollar-token issuers, not for bitcoin, but it is one more sign that the Fed now treats stablecoins as a permanent piece of the plumbing rather than a product to be waited out.

The CFTC pressed ahead on crypto market structure without Congress

Two days after the Senate rejected the CLARITY Act 49–50 on 15 September, the CFTC filed a rulemaking titled "Regulation of Crypto Asset Transactions and Crypto Asset Markets" with the White House regulatory review office, covering custody and settlement for individual transactions and how trading venues register. Chairman Michael Selig has floated a new exchange category that would let both registered and unregistered crypto venues offer leveraged trading under CFTC oversight without new legislation (247 Wall St.); a binding rule is not expected before late 2027.

Separately on 24 September the agency updated its crypto FAQs to say it would not object to firms using blockchain records in place of separate off-chain copies for recordkeeping, and clarified that customer funds may sit in tokenised versions of already-permitted assets (CoinDesk). Selig called it "regulatory clarity for the crypto industry"; it is closer to housekeeping than to the market-structure rule itself.

Sentiment cooled out of extreme greed

Our Fear & Greed reading eased from 78 (Extreme Greed) on 22 September to 71 (Greed) by 24 September as the price slipped. The funding rate on perpetual futures, which shows how hard traders are paying to stay long, fell alongside it: from an annualised 13.0% on 22 September to 4.1% on 24 September, a market unwinding leverage rather than panicking.

Chart: What longs paid shorts on the bitcoin perpetual, annualised, over September. Funding eased through the pullback rather than flipping negative. Open the chart

What it means for miners

Bitget's loss was real money and a bad day for its users, but almost none of it was bitcoin, and our own numbers show no dislocation in the bitcoin market around it: hashprice held close to $40 per petahash per day across the week, easing from about $41.30 on 22 September to roughly $40.24 today as the price softened, not because anything broke in the network. The next difficulty retarget is tracking about 3.5% lower, a small tailwind for revenue per terahash regardless of what any exchange is doing with its hot wallets.

The exchange failures that make headlines are custody failures, not mining failures, and they are also the reason nobody here holds coins with a venue at all: our guide on why nobody sells the coins to pay the power bill is the same argument from the other direction. A coin that never touches an exchange cannot be drained from one. Regulation is still catching up to that reality — the Fed's stablecoin rules and the CFTC's market-structure push both move at the pace of a 60-day comment period and a 2027 rulemaking, while a hot wallet can be emptied in the time it takes to detect it.

Sources and further reading

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.