Circle and Tether froze $318,000 in stablecoins from a Bitget hacker wallet on September 25, roughly 12 hours after the Bitget hack drained $387.5 million from the exchange. That blacklisted sum represents 0.08 percent of the total, while the bulk of stolen assets remain beyond the reach of any centralized freeze mechanism.
XRP's architecture blocks freeze attempts
XRP accounted for approximately $157 million of the Bitget hack haul, nearly 40 percent of the total. Neither Ripple nor the XRP Ledger Foundation can freeze XRP once it moves to non-custodial wallets. The XRP Ledger's architecture permits freeze tools only for issued tokens, not for XRP itself as the network's native coin. Ether made up an additional 63,000 ETH across multiple wallets, similarly immune to issuer-level freezes.
Stablecoins accounted for $88 million, mostly untouched
Approximately $88 million in dollar-backed tokens and tokenized commodities left Bitget's wallets during the September 24 breach. Circle identified a single wallet holding 170.47 ETH, 218,023 USDT and 99,990 USDC at 05:00 UTC on September 25, then blacklisted it. Tether subsequently banned the same address. The frozen sum totaled $318,000, leaving roughly $87.7 million in stablecoins active across other hacker-controlled addresses.
Both issuers maintain blacklist capabilities embedded in their smart contracts. Enforcement depends on identifying the relevant wallets before funds disperse through mixers or decentralized exchanges. One researcher flagged a newly created wallet that spent $19.67 million in USDT0 on 7,111 ETH within six minutes, paying roughly 5 percent above market rates to complete the swap before detection.
Loss total climbed as investigators traced chains
Bitget initially detected $183 million in unauthorized transfers at 18:31 UTC on September 24. The exchange announced a $351.6 million total hours later, then revised the figure to $387.5 million by September 25 as forensic teams identified compromised assets across five blockchains. CEO Gracy Chen attributed the breach to backend system compromise enabling spoofed transaction data, ruling out private key theft.
Native cryptocurrencies like XRP, Bitcoin and Ethereum lack the centralized issuer architecture that permits stablecoin freezes. The distinction mirrors earlier incidents where attackers extracted Bitcoin without touching keys, leaving no freeze option regardless of detection speed. Bitget's $464 million User Protection Fund covers the loss, though USDT dominance means stablecoin recovery tools apply to a shrinking share of cross-chain exploits.