Bitget funds reportedly shielded through Zcash after breach

Roughly $3.8 million worth of Zcash stolen from cryptocurrency exchange Bitget has already disappeared into a shielded transaction pool, making it effectively untraceable on the public ledger. The move is the latest chapter in a breach that ranks as the largest single crypto theft of 2026. Attackers linked to North Korea are reportedly using Zcash’s Ironwood shielded pool, a privacy feature designed to hide sender, receiver, and amount data, to launder a portion of the approximately $387.5 million they siphoned from the Seychelles-based exchange on September 24. Inside the breach Bitget’s security team first flagged the unauthorized activity at around 18:31 UTC. The initial damage estimate came in at $351.6 million, but a subsequent review bumped that figure to $387.5 million once the full scope of compromised wallets became clear. The stolen assets spanned a surprisingly wide menu. XRP accounted for the single largest chunk at roughly $157 million. The rest included ETH, USDT, USDC, ZEC, BNB, AVAX, and TRX, spread across networks including Ethereum, the XRP Ledger, Zcash, and TRON. What makes this breach particularly unsettling is how it happened. Investigators traced the root cau...