Bitget

Bitget is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2018 and registered in the Seychelles. Its CEO since May 2024 is Gracy Chen, who moved up from managing director; the company positions itself as a trading-and-Web3 group rather than a single app. Beyond the core spot and futures exchange, the Bitget brand covers a self-custodial Bitget Wallet, a payment card and a well-developed copy-trading network.

What distinguishes Bitget from the older US-facing exchanges is its centre of gravity: it grew up serving international derivatives and copy traders rather than beginners buying their first coin. That shapes everything from its product mix to the jurisdictions it operates in, and it is the reason "what is Bitget" often gets several different answers depending on whether someone means the exchange, the wallet or the card.

Bitget Wallet is a separate, self-custodial (non-custodial) wallet — you hold the keys, not Bitget — built on MPC technology and used for on-chain assets across many networks, swaps and dApp access. It is distinct from your exchange account: funds in the exchange are custodial, funds in the wallet are yours to secure. Confusing the two is a common mistake, because they share the Bitget name but have very different risk profiles.

In 2025 Bitget Wallet partnered with Mastercard and payments firm Immersve to launch a zero-fee crypto card that lets you spend directly from the self-custodial wallet at Mastercard merchants, with on-chain top-ups via USDC on Base. Availability rolled out first in the UK and EU. The card's selling point is that assets stay self-custodial until the moment you spend, rather than sitting on a custodian.

The official Bitget website is bitget.com, and the official apps are distributed through Bitget's own links to the Apple App Store and Google Play. Because Bitget is a large, search-heavy brand, it is a frequent target for phishing clones — near-identical sites on look-alike domains that harvest logins and 2FA codes. The safest habit is to type or bookmark bitget.com yourself rather than following a link from an email, ad or message.

When you log in, treat any page that reached you through a link with suspicion, enable an authenticator-app or hardware second factor, and remember that a genuine login never asks you to "confirm" your credentials on a page you arrived at from an unsolicited message. Bitget cannot recover funds sent to a phishing site, so avoiding the fake front door is the part of security that is entirely in your hands.

Copy trading is Bitget's flagship feature and the thing it is best known for. It lets you automatically mirror the positions of an "elite trader" — when they open or close a trade, your account replicates it in proportion to the funds you allocate. Bitget offers spot copy trading (following traders who buy and hold real assets, generally lower risk), futures copy trading (leveraged, higher risk), and bot copy trading, where you follow an automated strategy instead of a person.

You choose whom to copy using stats like followers, historical return and assets under management, and elite traders earn a share of their copiers' profits. The convenience comes with two things worth understanding: you inherit the leader's risk appetite, including leverage, and because copy trading fires a fee on every mirrored entry and exit, a very active leader can generate far more trading cost than you would place by hand.

Bitget's safety story turned sharply in September 2026. On 24 September attackers drained roughly $352 million (Bitget's own figure $351.6M; some analysts put it higher) from its hot and warm wallets across several networks, in an attack Bitget attributed to suspected North Korean actors. Its three-tier wallet design kept the cold-storage layer untouched. Bitget suspended withdrawals, said its User Protection Fund — over $464 million at the time — fully covers the loss, and began resuming withdrawals in phases from 28 September 2026, stating that no user balance was lost. That made-whole outcome is the company's own account and was still being verified as this profile was written.

Bitget also has a track record of intervening in market-manipulation events rather than fund thefts: in April 2025 it detected abnormal VOXEL/USDT perpetual-futures trading, rolled back the manipulative accounts within a day and compensated users who took legitimate losses, drawing on the same protection fund. As with every custodial exchange, Bitget holds your keys, so its safety rests on both its own defences and your account hygiene.

Bitget's spot trading fee is 0.1% for both maker and taker orders at the base level. Paying spot or margin fees with its native BGB token gives roughly a 20% discount, bringing the effective rate to about 0.08%. Perpetual futures are cheaper, starting near 0.02% maker and 0.06% taker, with VIP tiers lowering both as 30-day volume rises.

Copy trading adds a wrinkle other exchanges' fee pages skip: alongside normal trading fees, you pay the elite trader a profit share on winning trades, and every mirrored order incurs its own trading fee. So the real cost of following an active leader can be well above the headline 0.1%. Withdrawals carry the underlying network fee, which Bitget passes through.

Bitget does not operate as a licensed exchange for United States residents, and its main global platform is not intended for US users. This is the same pattern as several international derivatives-first exchanges: the product range that makes Bitget attractive elsewhere — high-leverage futures and copy trading — is exactly what US regulation restricts, so the company focuses on markets outside the US.

US-based users looking for regulated venues are generally better served by exchanges built for that market. Availability and rules change, and using a VPN to reach a platform not offered in your country typically breaks its terms of service and can put your access and funds at risk, so the safe assumption is that Bitget's exchange is not a US option.