Circle and Tether freeze wallet linked to Bitget's $351.6 million hack

Circle and Tether froze a wallet linked to Thursday's $351.6 million Bitget hack. Circle blacklisted the address at 05:00 UTC on Friday. Tether later banned the same wallet. The wallet held 170.47 ETH. It held 218,023 USDT. It held 99,990 USDC. About $318,000 in stablecoins remained frozen. Other exploiter addresses still held more than 63,000 ETH. Stablecoin issuers cannot freeze Ether itself. Circle's response contrasted with its handling of April's $285 million Drift hack. ZachXBT argued that Circle moved too slowly to blacklist wallets in that case. An attacker moved $232 million in USDC from Solana to Ethereum through Circle's cross-chain transfer protocol. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said attackers compromised a backend system in the exchange's wallet infrastructure. Chen said the attackers spoofed transaction data and triggered the authorization process to move funds. Chen ruled out a private key compromise. Chen said Bitget's user protection fund covers the full loss. The fund holds over $464 million. Bitget paused customer withdrawals on Friday as a security precaution. Chen said the suspension did not result from a funding shortfall. Bitget says it serves more than 120 million users worldwide. The hack affected several major networks and tokens. Additional affected tokens included USDT and USDC. Chen said Bitget's on-chain cold wallets remained secure. Several affected chain foundations confirmed freezes on suspected hacker addresses. Bitget Wallet remained independent and unaffected. Bitget had not provided a fixed recovery timeline. CRCL fell 5% on Friday. The stock broke below its 20-day exponential moving average at $89.66. The stock traded within a broader descending channel. The channel followed a breakout from a June-to-September rounding-bottom pattern that topped near $103. The relative strength index was 49.88. The key support range was $84.88 to $85.02.