Bitget Hacker Moves $83 Million Stolen XRP, Ripple Cannot Freeze Funds: 15 outlets compared

XRP cannot be frozen

A Bitget hacker moved about $83 million in stolen XRP out of three holding wallets, leaving another $75 million in accounts that cannot be frozen under the XRP Ledger’s existing rules. The XRP Ledger lets companies freeze tokens they issue on it, and “that power does not extend to XRP itself,” while Ripple has “no built-in way to block the attacker from spending those coins.”

Circle and Tether froze about $320,000 in stablecoins connected to the breach, while Bitget said its protection fund will cover the losses and customer balances are unaffected. CoinDesk’s review of XRP Ledger records found that by 12:41 UTC Saturday, two accounts that initially held 20 million XRP each had been reduced to about 23 and 55 tokens, and a third was down about 5.8 million XRP.

Transfers and staged withdrawals

Bitget said withdrawals would resume in stages from Sept. 28 through Oct. 2, with bitcoin withdrawals scheduled to resume Sept. 28, ether on Sept. 29, USDT on Sept. 30 and other tokens on Oct. 2.

A wallet tied to the hacker withdrew about $1.23 million worth of Ether from Binance, after Lookonchain pointed to a transfer of 457.9 ETH, worth $1.23 million, from Binance to the attacker’s wallet.