Companies Freeze Tiny Slice of $351M Stolen in Bitget Hack

A major crypto (digital money) exchange called Bitget was hacked on Thursday, and thieves stole a staggering $351.6 million. Now two big companies are trying to help — but they can only recover a tiny piece of the money.

What happened?

Bitget is a platform where people buy and sell cryptocurrencies. According to its CEO, Gracy Chen, the attackers broke into a behind-the-scenes system, faked transaction details, and tricked the exchange into sending funds out. The good news: Bitget has a user protection fund (a safety pot of money set aside to cover losses) worth over $464 million, which will cover what customers lost.

The rescue attempt

Two companies — Circle and Tether — stepped in. Both issue *stablecoins* (cryptocurrencies designed to always be worth $1). Circle makes USDC and Tether makes USDT. Because they control these coins, they can "freeze" or blacklist a wallet, making the coins inside unusable.

They froze a wallet linked to the hacker containing:

• 170.47 ETH (Ethereum, a popular cryptocurrency)
• 218,023 USDT
• 99,990 USDC

Why can't they freeze the rest?

Here's the catch: the thieves still hold more than 63,000 ETH in other wallets. No company can freeze Ethereum — unlike stablecoins, it has no central issuer that controls it. So most of the stolen money is still out of reach.

A faster response this time

Circle acted quickly, blacklisting the wallet at 05:00 UTC on Friday. This was praised because critics said Circle was too slow after an earlier hack (the "Drift" hack in April), when about $232 million in stolen USDC slipped away before action was taken.

The bottom line: Companies can only freeze the stolen coins they actually control. The vast majority of this heist — in Ethereum — remains beyond anyone's power to lock down.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/09/25/circle-and-tether-step-in-to-freeze-hacker-wallet-after-massive-bitget-crypto-heist