Circle and Tether Freeze Stablecoins Linked to Bitget Hack, Recovering Only $318,000

Circle and Tether acted to freeze stablecoins in a wallet associated with the recent Bitget exchange hack, but the bulk of the stolen assets remain out of reach.

Freeze actions by stablecoin issuers

At 05:00 UTC on Friday, Circle used the built‑in freeze function in the USDC contract to blacklist the address labeled “Bitget Exploiter 8” on Etherscan. Roughly seven hours later, Tether’s multisig signer added the same address to the USDT blacklist. Together the two actions locked approximately 99,990 USDC and 218,023 USDT, valued at about $318,000.

Limitations of the freeze

The targeted wallet also held around 170 ETH, which remains untouched. Issuers can freeze their own tokens at the contract level, but they have no authority to freeze native Ethereum, leaving a large portion of the attacker’s holdings beyond recovery.

Scale of the breach

Blockchain trackers show other exploiter‑linked addresses still control more than 63,000 ETH. The Bitget hack is estimated to have drained roughly $387 million, with North Korea’s Lazarus Group suspected. Bitget has a user protection fund of over $464 million to cover losses.

Implications

The rapid blacklisting demonstrates a faster response than some prior incidents, yet it also highlights ongoing concerns about the centralized control stablecoin issuers have over assets that are otherwise designed to be permissionless.