So do you believe that the industry is currently equipped to defend against nation state attackers and specifically Lazarus, since they seem to be the most aggressive?

If I can be very precise, there is no formal attribution, but I did say in the very first hours during the live that when we look at the VPN and how the hackers launder those money, it does look very similar to how Lazarus really act.

So it's not like a formal attribution, but I do still stand with what I said before.

And again, for the details of the security issue itself, Slomis and Mendian published something, but they also didn't publish anything about the hacker's attribution.

But on the border question, I think, yes, it's a very specific, hard group of people that's targeting this industry.

And I've been seeing the industry making progress.

But they are still, if you look at how they attack, right, like they are more targeting credentials, process and trusted tools, rather than maybe originally mainly about private keys.

You probably have some data to actually show what's happening, right? So what are you seeing in trading activity and flows on BitGet that might support where the market's at right now?

So, um, first of all, tell us how Bitget figured out that it was being hacked and how you learned about it.

Sure.

Yeah, so beginning at 6, um, 31 PM UTC on September 24, we saw some unauthorized transfers.

Actually, 6:31 was the first, uh, first round of, uh, unauthorized, uh, withdrawal, and that's very small amount.

I think it, the attacker or the hackers are actually very smart, that they just did some testing transfer, 0.48 Ethereum from a Eth hot wallet, and then 93 TRX from a Tron hot wallet.

Both were below the risk control threshold and did not trigger a system alert.

But at 6:58 UTC that day, uh, the attacker initiated 17...

So, um, you know, what's your, like, like s- when you made the request, what was your understanding about their capabilities, um, to, you know, potentially block the laundering of the stolen funds?

You're able to just give us a brief run through of what happened, and I guess when you first became aware of what was happening as well.

OK. Yeah.

So what happened is on UTC time, 6.31 p.m. on September 24th this year, there were some unauthorized transfers involving certain assets that were made across public, sorry, multiple blockchains from our, from Bigats hot and warm wallets.

so the investigation so far we found that the attacker exploited a vulnerability in a third-party security product to obtain high-level internal credentials and the attacker then used these credentials to send fraudulent withdrawal comments to the wallet system causing it to execute abnormal transfers that bypassed the risk controls we can confirm that private keys were not compromised and code wallets were not affected How I got involved and be aware of this incident was about within one and a half hour after the incident started.

Actually, because I was in I'm in Asia and my time zone wise, it was actually about my 4 a.m. in the morning.

I just happened to wake up.

at that time, which is a coincidence.

Have there already been processes now that you look at and and want to change going forward to obviously just bolster your security within their exchange? And is there any of those that you can share with us today?

Was that thanks to this third party that was involved? How did you kind of figure out that this is actually what happened and how the attackers gained access? And do you think that this is also the result of having access to frontier LLMs, AI models to help find vulnerabilities in service providers, exchanges, the kind of hacks that we've been seeing in recent months?

Yeah, so about AI that we can talk about more, but let me, before we dive into this question, let me give you more details on the timing so that we get to see what exactly happened.

We mentioned 6.30 PM, 6.31 PM specifically.

on UTC time that day, that was when the first unauthorized withdrawal occurred.

But that amount is actually very small.

So there were two transactions, one Ethereum, one TRX, TRUMP.

So there were 0.84 Ethereum from an Ethereum hot wallet, and then 93 TRX from a Tron hot wallet that's transferred out.

How are you going to go about replenishing this fund? Is that something that you would just do quite quickly or is it going to take a few months or a few years to get up to the same level of coverage that you had in that fund up until uh this incident

Um, can you talk to us a little bit about your universal exchange thesis and how you see it playing out?

Sure.

Uh, we came up with the term universal exchange more than a year ago, so it wasn't, like, a new narrative that we are talking about only this year.

Actually, uh, we've been building on not just, you know, promoting the idea, but also building, like, really delivering, uh, products on the concept of universal exchange for, for about a year time.

So just to give you some data points on that, basically about a year ago we talked about, we started to talk about universal exchange and, in our opinion, universal exchange means ...

Oh, by the way, short term is UEX.

And, and, and you can see, um, probably i- if you've been in crypto world for a long time, you know DEX and CEX, centralized exchange and de- decentralized exchange.

Are there any sort of ambitions for Bitget to break into that market if clarity was to be passed, and how do you see the US market, uh, as a whole?

So Gracie, I, um, you know, would love to hear more about the universal exchange and y- what your vision is for that.

Sure.

Yeah, in crypto world, we are very familiar with the term, um, CEX and, uh, DEX, centralized exchanges and, uh, decentralized exchanges.

Uh, after FTX collapsed, there were a lot of, uh, uh, debate on whether there should be more DeFi trading, DEX, and maybe CEX have too much power because we are the custodial platform together with the trading platform, and some users also, uh, have their, uh, assets on CEXs doing some earning, et cetera.

I think, uh, after three years after FTX collapsed, uh, things cooled down.

Definitely people still trust CEX.

Uh, the UX kind of, uh, market share went up, uh, about 20% from...

Um, yeah.

like, you know, the users kind of doesn't really care? Or like, how do you see the tokenization of stocks versus having, you know, directly trading stocks?

So there are a few questions in here.

Well, we'll answer them one by one.

The first one, which kind of users are we tackle who are not for or some sort of needs, right? Which are not fulfilled by the previous TradFi brokers, right? I would say it may not be a huge problem for some fully developed countries like, for example, the U.S.

U.S. investors or U.S. citizens can easily buy U.S. stocks.

But that's not true for many other parts of the world.

There are so many people who can't even open a trading or broker account with those platforms.

How do you see the competition from decentralized exchanges?

Me too.

Kudos to that.

So at that time, the direction was much clearer.

But once Bitcoin surpassed 100K, which is psychologically a very important point.

Since last time, the all-time high was pretty much here.

We never really surpassed 110K, which again, we see lots of resistance now.

So in terms of funding rate and we measure direction and how people think about the market, I think right now it's much more vague.

But it seems when you see it as a trend, it's worth watching.

all good amazing amazing so uh guys if you want to come up just uh uh let us know uh otherwise uh the guys from arkham i see we've got miguel on miguel anything that you want to add

Well, Miguel, do you want to go ahead? Okay.

So I actually don't have that much question.

Maybe one followed by sharing a little bit story behind what we were thinking when we were trying to support Bybit.

As Ben mentioned, we were among one of the first exchanges to send them.

We sent them actually 40,000 Ethereum about four or five hours after the hack.

as a bridge loan without any collateral, without any interest rate, and we're not rushing them to pay back.