Tether and Circle Freeze Stolen Funds, Over 63,000 ETH Remains Unaccounted For

Circle and Tether have taken action to freeze $318,000 in USDT and USDC linked to the recent Bitget hack. According to a report by CoinDesk and data cited by Wu Blockchain on X, the affected wallet held 218,023 USDT and 99,990 USDC.

Circle blacklisted the address 'Bitget Exploiter 8' at 05:00 UTC on September 25, followed by Tether's confirmation that it had also blacklisted the wallet. This move effectively immobilized only a small portion of the assets associated with the attack, as more than 63,000 ETH remains in attacker-linked wallets.

The freezing mechanism used by Circle and Tether is not applicable to Ethereum (ETH), which does not have an issuer-controlled blacklist. The distinction between frozen stablecoins and unfrozen ether highlights the limits of this approach for recovering stolen assets.