Circle and Tether have frozen stablecoins residing in an address connected to Thursday’s $351.6 million Bitget hack, though this locked sum represents only a minor portion of the overall loss.
On-chain records demonstrate that Circle blacklisted the specific destination, marked by Etherscan as “Bitget Exploiter 8,” on Friday at 05:00 UTC. The target repository contains approximately 170.47 ETH, 218,023 USDT alongside 99,990 USDC. Blockchain analytics organization MistTrack reported that Tether has subsequently blocked the wallet as well.
Consequently, around $318,000 worth of stablecoins remain locked. Monitoring tools from MistTrack indicate that alternate attacker wallets continue holding in excess of 63,000 ETH, which no single issuer possesses the capability to freeze.
Bitget Chief Executive Officer Gracy Chen explained that assailants breached a backend architecture within the exchange’s wallet management framework, falsified transaction records, and initiated its validation mechanism to withdraw assets. She dismissed the possibility of a private key compromise. Chen noted that Bitget’s user protection reserve, which maintains over $464 million, absorbs the deficit.
Circle’s rapid intervention stands in contrast to its handling of April’s $285 million Drift exploit. During that incident, the perpetrator transferred roughly $232 million in USDC across chains from Solana to Ethereum via Circle’s native cross-chain protocol. Industry commentators including ZachXBT argued that Circle could have acted faster to blacklist addresses and suspend the assets. Circle maintained that it executes freezes solely when bound by legal mandates.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/09/25/circle-and-tether-step-in-to-freeze-hacker-wallet-after-massive-bitget-crypto-heist.
