Bitget Hackers Move Over Half of Stolen XRP Amid Recovery Efforts
Bitget, a cryptocurrency exchange that was hacked recently, has seen over half of the stolen XRP moved out of five initial wallets. The hackers have transferred about 54 million XRP worth $83 million to other wallets. This puts significant pressure on recovery efforts as more than half of the original amount is now inaccessible.
The Bitget theft initially involved approximately 103 million XRP, valued at around $160 million. The combined balance in these five initial wallets dropped from about 70 million XRP at 12:32 a.m. ET (04:32 UTC) on Saturday to roughly 49 million XRP eight hours later.
The speed of the transfers accelerated as more wallets were involved, with funds being divided among additional accounts. One attempted transfer of around 521,000 XRP failed due to insufficient funds in the receiving account, but a second wallet successfully sent the same amount to the same recipient an hour later.
XRP's native asset is not controlled by Ripple through a built-in blacklist function, unlike USDC and USDT. This leaves exchanges as potential intervention points if the stolen tokens reach a platform that can restrict associated accounts and block withdrawals.