Circle and Tether have frozen a wallet tied to the $351.6 million Bitget exchange hack, according to onchain data.

The wallet, labeled "Bitget Exploiter 8" on Etherscan, held roughly $318,000 in stablecoins at the time of the freeze. It contained 170.47 ETH, 218,023 USDT and 99,990 USDC. The action was taken at 05:00 UTC on Friday, after blockchain security firm MistTrack reported that Tether had also banned the address.

The freeze represents only a fraction of the funds stolen in the breach. Other addresses linked to the attack still hold more than 63,000 ETH, a sum that no stablecoin issuer can currently block.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said the attackers compromised a backend system in the exchange’s wallet infrastructure, spoofed transaction data and triggered the platform’s authorization process to move funds. She said the breach did not involve a private key compromise. Chen added that Bitget’s user protection fund, which holds over $464 million, would cover the loss.

Circle’s response came more quickly than during the April Drift hack, when roughly $232 million in USDC was moved across chains before any freeze was applied. In that earlier case, critics including analyst ZachXBT argued that Circle could have acted faster to blacklist involved wallets. Circle has previously stated it only freezes assets when legally required.

The incident highlights ongoing tensions between centralized stablecoin issuers and decentralized crypto ecosystems, particularly around the speed and scope of fund freezes following large-scale exchange breaches.