Circle and Tether freeze about $318,000 linked to Bitget theft

Circle and Tether froze about $318,000 in USDT and USDC in wallets linked to the Bitget theft, while CoinDesk reported that the amount represented only a small portion of the roughly $351.6 million stolen.

At 05:00 UTC on Friday, Circle blacklisted the address Etherscan labeled “Bitget Exploiter 8”; Tether later blocked the same wallet.

More than 63,000 ETH remained in other addresses linked to the attacker, and stablecoin issuers cannot freeze ether.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said the attacker compromised the exchange’s wallet-infrastructure backend, forged transaction data and triggered the authorization process to transfer funds, while ruling out a private-key compromise.

Bitget said its user-protection fund held more than $464 million and could absorb the loss.

Circle’s quick action contrasted with its response to the April Drift hack, a breach involving roughly $285 million in total; attackers moved about $232 million in stolen USDC from Solana to Ethereum through Circle’s cross-chain transfer protocol.