Gate has notably shifted its tone in the dispute over a user’s claimed $1.7 million loss, pledging to actively help trace and recover the funds and issuing an apology—a marked change from the firm denial it offered days earlier, though one that stops well short of admitting any fault.
From denial to cooperation
In a new statement, translated from Chinese, the exchange struck a conciliatory note absent from its initial response. Gate said that upon receiving the user’s feedback, it had established direct contact and maintained ongoing communication and that it had formed an internal expert team to assist the user in tracing the relevant fund flow.
It added that it had completed the collection of information and verification of the incident details with the user and was simultaneously assisting with applications for fund freezing and recovery.
The exchange went further, saying it is urging the user to file a formal case and seek judicial assistance and pledging that the company would provide full cooperation throughout any legal process. “We are fully committed to advancing the fund recovery efforts,” the statement read. It is a meaningfully different posture from where the matter stood on July 8, when Gate firmly denied any systemic security breach and the two sides appeared locked at an impasse, with the user demanding transparency, a freeze on the relevant addresses, and a compensation plan.
Gate also addressed the public backlash directly. Responding to complaints raised online about its staff handling customers with a “poor attitude,” the exchange said it had placed high priority on the issue and would add clear internal guidelines to strengthen communication with its user community. It closed with an apology “to the customer and the wider online community,” thanking users for their criticism and suggestions.
An apology, but not an admission
The crucial distinction is what the apology does and does not concede. Gate’s contrition is directed at its conduct and communication—the perceived poor customer service and the handling of the episode—and at the distress caused, not at culpability for the loss itself.
Nowhere in the statement does the exchange accept that its systems were breached or that it bears financial responsibility for the missing funds. Its willingness to help with tracing, freezing, and recovery is framed as goodwill and cooperation, the kind of assistance an exchange can extend to any theft victim, rather than as remediation for its own failure.
That framing keeps Gate’s underlying position intact. In its original response, the exchange laid out a detailed timeline arguing that every consequential action on the account — a face-verification, the submission of handheld-identity videos to customer service, an email change, and a sequence of security resets covering the login password, the authenticator app, and the fund password — was completed by the account holder and cleared multiple verification layers.
By that account, the withdrawals of roughly 49.96 ETH, 746,475 HSK, and 1,565,982 USDT were the end of a chain of properly authenticated steps, not the result of a system compromise. The new statement’s cooperative tone does not retract any of that; it layers assistance on top of a defense the exchange has not abandoned.
The dispute, the goodwill doesn’t settle
Beneath the softened tone, the central question remains exactly as unresolved as before: if Gate’s records show the account’s actions passing its verification checks, yet the user insists he authorized none of them, what actually happened to the money?
The user, known on X as @jheioff, has maintained rigorous personal security, used passkeys, disabled cloud sync for his authenticator and official apps only, and has speculated that his face may have been deepfaked to clear verification, while demanding to know who submitted the identity materials and why resets occurred without his knowledge.
Gate’s own evidence points in a different direction, and it is worth weighing fairly. In its detailed reply, the exchange noted that the user had verified older records tied to his account, including 2019 Alipay payment records matching his exchange identity, and raised the possibility that a device or linked account on the user’s side had been compromised, a scenario that would explain verified actions the user genuinely did not knowingly perform.
Neither side’s account is proven, and both are advanced in apparent good faith: a user who says he did nothing wrong and lost a fortune and an exchange whose logs show authenticated activity it did not initiate. What has changed is not the facts but the footing. Gate has recalculated its public approach, choosing cooperation and contrition over pure defense, in a case that has become a flashpoint for a hard question the industry keeps confronting—where responsibility lies when an account is drained through steps that satisfy every security check and whether an exchange’s duty ends at verification or extends to helping make a victim whole. For now, Gate is offering the help, withholding the admission, and leaving the answer to the investigation and, potentially, the courts.
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