Bitget Hack: Circle And Tether Freeze Only A Small Portion Of The Stolen Funds

Circle and Tether froze on Friday part of the assets of an address linked to the Bitget hack, about 318,000 dollars of stablecoins. The amount remains marginal compared to the 387.5 million dollars stolen. Most of the loot is held in ether, an asset that no issuer can block.

A freeze of 318,000 dollars against 387.5 million stolen

The hack suffered by Bitget on Thursday cost 387.5 million dollars, according to the platform’s latest report. Circle blacklisted one of the exploit addresses on Friday at 05:00 UTC. Tether did the same shortly after, according to MistTrack, quoted by CoinDesk.

The concerned address, labeled by the Etherscan explorer as “Bitget Exploiter 8”, contained 170.47 ETH, 218,023 USDT, and 99,990 USDC. These blocks freeze the 318,000 dollars in stablecoins it holds. A stablecoin, a token backed by a currency, can be blacklisted by its issuing company: the funds remain visible on the blockchain but stop moving.

At the case level, the round-up remains modest. The 318,000 dollars immobilized weigh less than 0.1% of the 387.5 million stolen. Circle and Tether can only act on their own tokens, USDT and USDC.

Why more than 63,000 ETH remain out of reach

The bulk of the loot is elsewhere. MistTrack lists hacker addresses that still hold more than 63,000 ETH, worth about 170 million dollars. No issuer can freeze ether. The blockchain has no administrator for its native currency, and therefore no blacklist to add these funds.

This limitation does not prevent mass freezes. Tether uses it on a large scale: more than 514 million dollars blocked in one month, according to BlockSec data. But the measure only ever affects tokens present on the targeted address, not the ether it holds.

Unable to seize these funds, the game is played on traceability. MistTrack tracks the movements of the 63,000 ETH, watching for a conversion or deposit on a platform, two steps where the loot can still be intercepted.

Drift, the precedent that explains Circle’s reaction

Last April, the Drift protocol lost 285 million dollars. The hacker had converted a large part of the funds into USDC, then transferred 232 million dollars from Solana to Ethereum via CCTP, Circle’s cross-chain protocol. Investigator ZachXBT criticized the issuer’s slowness to blacklist the addresses.

This time, the response came quickly. It took about ten hours between the detection of the hack, Thursday at 18:31 UTC, and the blacklisting by Circle, Friday at 05:00 UTC. This speed has a downside. Blocking funds without legal basis can expose the issuer to lawsuits, which explains Circle’s usual caution.

The Bitget case remains open. Withdrawals remain suspended during the checks, and the platform promises a complete technical report. The whole aftermath will depend on the destination of the 63,000 ETH still in the wild: each deposit on a platform or conversion into stablecoins will reopen an interception window. After a record quarter of hacks, this duel between tracing and laundering will show if issuer cooperation matters in these cases.