Circle and Tether step in to freeze hacker wallet after massive Bitget crypto heist

Circle and Tether have blacklisted a wallet linked to a $351.6 million hack of crypto exchange Bitget, freezing the stablecoin balances held in that address, onchain records and blockchain trackers show. Etherscan labels the address as "Bitget Exploiter 8," and onchain data indicate it held about 170.47 ETH, 218,023 USDT and 99,990 USDC when Circle added it to a blacklist at 05:00 UTC on Friday. Blockchain security firm MistTrack said Tether has likewise banned the wallet.

The frozen stablecoins amount to only a small slice of the stolen value — roughly $318,000 — because the bulk of the funds linked to the exploit remain as ether across other exploiter addresses. MistTrack's tracker shows those other addresses still hold more than 63,000 ETH, assets that stablecoin issuers cannot freeze because they are native chain tokens rather than issuer-controlled dollar equivalents.

Bitget's chief executive, Gracy Chen, said the attackers compromised a backend system in the exchange's wallet infrastructure and spoofed transaction data to trigger its authorization process, and she denied a private-key compromise. Chen said Bitget will absorb the loss through its user protection fund, which the company says holds over $464 million.

Observers compared Circle's rapid move to blacklist the address with its response to a separate April incident involving a $285 million exploit of Drift, when roughly $232 million in USDC was moved across chains. Critics at the time argued Circle could have acted faster; Circle has said it freezes assets when legally required. The Bitget incident highlights both the practical ability of stablecoin issuers to impede movement of tokenized dollars and the limits of that power when most stolen value is held in non-freezable native tokens.