Bitget Hackers Hide $3.9 Million in Shielded Zcash Pool

The Bitget hack has led to a significant development in the laundering of stolen Zcash. On September 30, hackers moved $3.9 million worth of ZEC into Ironwood, Zcash's newest shielded pool. This move is particularly noteworthy as it represents about 15 percent of the stolen ZEC and severs the on-chain trail for investigators.

The funds were deposited across three transfers between 08:15 and 08:46 UTC, with two intermediary addresses fed from a wallet attributed to the attacker by Bitget. Once inside Ironwood, sender, recipient, and transfer amount become encrypted, making it difficult to link incoming funds to future outflows.

Ironwood is one of Zcash's shielded pools, which conceal transaction details like sender, recipient, and amount. This makes it challenging for investigators to track the flow of funds within the pool. However, if any shielded funds later resurface at a public address, analysts can infer connections based on timing, value sizes, and other metadata.

The attackers have also explored other exit routes, including Ether-to-Bitcoin swaps processed on THORChain and an attempt to push more than $50 million through NEAR Intents' SHIELD system. Additionally, Circle and Tether have taken action against exploiter-linked wallets, freezing over $318,013 in stablecoins.