Circle and Tether freeze $318,000 tied to Bitget hack as funds escape

Circle and Tether froze a wallet linked to the Bitget exchange hack. Their actions locked roughly $318,000 in stablecoins. The freeze covered 99,990 USDC and 218,023 USDT. Circle blacklisted the address at 05:00 UTC Friday. Tether added the same address to its USDT blacklist roughly seven hours later. The wallet also held around 170 ETH that remained untouched. Issuers can freeze their own tokens through contract-level blacklists. No issuer can freeze Ethereum itself. The attacker appears to have converted stablecoins into ETH before the issuers intervened. Blockchain trackers indicate that other linked addresses still hold more than 63,000 ETH. Early estimates put the Bitget breach at roughly $387 million. Analysts have pointed to North Korea's Lazarus Group as a possible culprit. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said attackers compromised a backend system in the exchange's wallet infrastructure. Chen said the attackers spoofed transaction data to trigger unauthorized transfers. Chen ruled out a private-key compromise. Bitget said its user protection fund holds more than $464 million to cover losses. Most of the stolen funds moved beyond reach before Circle and Tether acted.