Circle and Tether Freeze Stablecoins Tied to Bitget Hack—But Most Funds Slip Away
Circle and Tether froze a wallet tied to the Bitget exchange hack, blocking about $318,000 in stablecoins from the attacker. Circle blacklisted the address first using USDC’s contract-level freeze function, and Tether blacklisted it later on USDT, locking roughly 99,990 USDC and 218,023 USDT. The move came too late to recover most of the stolen funds. The attacker had already converted much of the loot into ETH, which cannot be frozen at the protocol level, and the wallet still holds about 170 ETH. Other linked wallets are also reported to hold more than 63,000 ETH beyond issuer control. The Bitget breach drained hundreds of millions of dollars, with early estimates near $387 million. Bitget said a backend system in its wallet infrastructure was compromised, not private keys, and it says its user protection fund will cover losses. The incident also renewed debate over how much control stablecoin issuers have over supposedly decentralized assets.
