What happened to Duelbits?
Crypto casino and betting platform Duelbits remained offline on September 25 after its co-founder announced a hack worth approximately $7 million. According to a report by The Defiant, the co-founder, who goes by Joe, wrote in an update at 2:28 PM ET that the team needed "a little more time offline" to secure the platform. Meanwhile, customers waited for withdrawals to resume. [1]
Duelbits is a so-called crypto casino and sportsbook, meaning a platform that combines gambling and sports betting with deposits and withdrawals in cryptocurrencies.
What is not yet known
The available source does not reveal how the attack occurred, which specific funds or wallets were affected, or exactly when withdrawals will restart. It is also not documented whether and how affected users will be compensated. These points remain open, and confirming them would require an official statement from the operator or on-chain analysis, which the published sources do not contain.
We therefore stick only to what is documented: the hack announcement by the co-founder, the approximate figure of $7 million, and the fact that the platform was offline at that moment. [1]
How does Duelbits fit into the broader week of attacks?
The Duelbits case did not come alone. During the same days, the crypto market was dealing with a significantly larger incident at the Bitget exchange. We include it as context, not as part of the same attack, because the sources do not link the two cases together.
| Case | Estimated damage | Key facts |
|---|---|---|
| Duelbits | ~$7 million | Casino offline, withdrawals suspended (Sept 25) [1] |
| Bitget | up to $387.5 million | Breach on Sept 24, damage raised from $351.6 million [2][4] |
What is known about the Bitget hack?
The Bitget exchange raised its estimate of the value of stolen assets from an original $351.6 million to $387.5 million. According to a September 25 update from CEO Gracy Chen, the increase reflects additional on-chain tracing that identified assets in Zcash and on the TRON network that were missing from the original accounting. Chen said these were transfers from the original incident and that no new unauthorized transactions had occurred. [2]
According to CoinDesk, Chen explained on X that the attackers did not compromise private keys but breached the wallet backend and falsified transaction data (so-called spoofed transfers). [4]
A portion of the stolen funds was frozen. According to Decrypt, stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether blocked a wallet labeled "Bitget Exploiter 8" and locked roughly $318,000 in USDC and USDT. However, the attacker managed to swap the majority of the funds into ETH, which cannot be frozen. [3]
What to watch for with this type of incident
This is not trading advice. It is a list of verifiable signals that can be tracked in similar events:
- Official operator updates. For Duelbits, we so far only have the co-founder's statement and the offline status. [1]
- On-chain tracing. For Bitget, the damage estimate rose after further tracing, which shows that first figures tend to be incomplete. [2]
- Attack vector. For Bitget, it was not a theft of keys but a spoofing of data on the backend. For Duelbits, the published sources do not state the vector. [4]
- Freezes versus leaks. Centralized stablecoins can be frozen, but not ETH, into which attackers often convert the funds. [3]
We will return to the Duelbits case as soon as verifiable information becomes available about the service restoration, the attack vector, and any compensation.