Circle and Tether have frozen stablecoins held in a wallet linked to Thursday's $351.6 million Bitget hack, though the frozen amount represents only a small fraction of the total stolen funds.
Circle blacklisted the address labeled "Bitget Exploiter 8" at 05:00 UTC Friday, according to onchain data. The wallet held approximately 170.47 ETH, 218,023 USDT, and 99,990 USDC. Blockchain security firm MistTrack confirmed that Tether subsequently banned the same wallet, leaving roughly $318,000 in stablecoins frozen.
The majority of stolen funds remain inaccessible to freezing mechanisms. MistTrack's tracking shows other exploiter addresses still holding more than 63,000 ETH, which no stablecoin issuer can freeze.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said attackers compromised a backend system in the exchange's wallet infrastructure, spoofed transaction data, and triggered its authorization process to move funds. She ruled out a private key compromise. Chen stated that Bitget's user protection fund, which holds over $464 million, covers the loss.
Circle's response came faster than its handling of April's Drift hack. In that incident, an attacker moved approximately $232 million in USDC from Solana to Ethereum using Circle's cross-chain transfer protocol. Critics noted at the time that Circle could have acted more quickly to blacklist wallets and freeze funds. Circle has stated it freezes assets when legally required.
