Circle Freezes Stolen Funds Amid Ongoing Investigation into Bitget Hack
Circle has frozen $318,000 in stablecoins linked to the Bitget security breach. The affected funds include 218,023 USDT and 99,990 USDC, as well as 170.47 ETH. However, this freeze only covers a small portion of the approximately $351.6 million in assets that were impacted.
The blacklisted Ethereum wallet held significant amounts of stablecoins and ETH. Circle and Tether have the ability to block their tokens, but neither issuer has control over transfers of ETH. This highlights the complexities of dealing with cryptocurrency security breaches, particularly when multiple types of assets are involved.
Bitget detected unauthorized transactions at 2:31 p.m. ET on Thursday (18:31 UTC). The exchange attributed the breach to a compromised backend system in its wallet infrastructure, which allowed transaction data to be spoofed and authorization procedures to be triggered. Fortunately, Bitget's cold wallets were unaffected, and its User Protection Fund held more than $464 million.