Circle and Tether Freeze Wallet After Bitget Hack
Circle and Tether blacklisted USDT and USDC after the Bitget hack, but most of the loot is still in ether and out of reach.
Key Takeaways
- Circle and Tether froze stablecoins in a wallet linked to the $351.6 million Bitget hack.
- The wallet held about 170.47 ETH, 218.023 USDT, and 99.990 USDC; about $318,000 in stablecoins is now frozen.
- Most of the loot is in ether and cannot be frozen by Circle or Tether.
Circle and Tether have frozen stablecoins in a wallet linked to the hack of $351.6 million (€308 million) at Bitget. It is only a small part of the loot, because most of the stolen funds are in ether and cannot be frozen by an issuer.
Wallet on Blacklist
Circle blacklisted the address, which is listed on Etherscan as "Bitget Exploiter 8," on Friday at 05:00 UTC. According to onchain data, the wallet contains about 170.47 ETH, 218.023 USDT, and 99.990 USDC. Blockchain security firm MistTrack later also reported that Tether blocked the wallet.
That means about $318,000 (€278,900) in stablecoins is now frozen. That is small compared with the total damage, but it does show that stablecoin issuers can move fast when the funds are still in a form that can be frozen.
Most of the Loot Remains Out of Reach
MistTrack says other wallets belonging to the attacker still hold more than 63,000 ETH. Those funds cannot be frozen by Circle or Tether, because ether does not fall under the same blacklist approach as USDT and USDC.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said attackers compromised a backend system in the wallet infrastructure of the crypto exchange. According to her, transaction information was spoofed, which tricked the authorization process. Chen ruled out a leak of a private key. Bitget says its own User Protection Fund, with more than $464 million (€407 million), covers the damage.
Earlier, Bitget itself had already pointed to possible North Korean involvement in the attack, after the exchange confirmed the backend compromise and spoofed transaction data.
Why This Matters
For European crypto followers, this incident shows how differently stablecoins and native crypto react to a hack. USDT and USDC can be frozen if the issuer acts quickly, but ETH is much harder to recover in a case like this. That makes wallet security and backend systems just as important as protecting private keys.
