Circle and Tether freeze $318,000 from the Bitget hack, under 0.1% of the $351.6 million taken

Circle and Tether have frozen the stablecoins sitting in one wallet tied to Thursday's $351.6 million hack of crypto exchange Bitget. The amount caught is about $318,000, according to CoinDesk, which is about 0.09% of what left the exchange.

Circle blacklisted the address, labeled "Bitget Exploiter 8" on Etherscan, at 05:00 UTC Friday, and blockchain security firm MistTrack said Tether banned it too. The wallet held about 218,023 USDT and 99,990 USDC, plus roughly 170 ETH that the freeze does not touch.

The number behind the freeze

Headlines about issuers "stepping in" suggest the money is being clawed back. It mostly is not. MistTrack's tracker shows other exploiter addresses still holding more than 63,000 ETH, CoinDesk reported. At ether's price of about $2,687 on Coinbase around midday Friday, that is roughly $169 million, or about 48% of the total loss, sitting in an asset with no issuer and no freeze button.

That split is the practical lesson. A stablecoin is a claim on a company that can blacklist addresses; ether and bitcoin are not. A freeze only reaches whatever is still held in USDT or USDC when the issuer acts, and here that was a small remainder.

Circle moved faster this time than after April's $285 million Drift hack, when, CoinDesk noted, the attacker moved about $232 million in USDC across chains using Circle's own transfer protocol before any freeze. Circle has said it freezes assets when legally required.

What Bitget now says happened

Our first report on Thursday noted that Bitget had not said how its wallets were breached. It has now given an outline. Chief executive Gracy Chen said the attacker got into a backend wallet system, used it to spoof transfer information and triggered Bitget's own authorization-signing process, according to CNBC. "Private key compromise has been ruled out," she said.

Chen also said investigators found internet addresses tied to VPN services previously used by a North Korean hacking group, and that the attack pattern resembled earlier operations attributed to the country. She described the evidence as preliminary. The theft ran through 19 transfers and hit ether, XRP, USDT, USDC, Avalanche and BNB across five networks, CNBC reported.

Who is still waiting

Withdrawals remain suspended. Chen would not give a firm date but said reopening "shouldn't take weeks." Deposits and trading continue, so a Bitget user can trade but cannot move coins or cash off the platform. For anyone holding collateral there for positions elsewhere, that is the real cost of the hack so far, because balances are intact but not portable.

Bitget says its User Protection Fund, which holds more than $464 million, covers the loss. The freeze does little to change that math: $318,000 recovered against $351.6 million lost leaves the fund carrying almost all of it.

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Sources: CoinDesk, CNBC, Coinbase Exchange ETH-USD price. Dollar value of the 63,000 ETH is our calculation at the Coinbase price. This is market information, not investment advice.