Freezing Stolen Crypto: Where the Limits Lie

When coins are stolen, it is not a company's goodwill that decides whether the proceeds can be frozen. It is the way the token was built. The past few days have shown that with unusual clarity. The attacker who drained assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the trading platform Bitget was able to move roughly 83 million dollars in XRP without obstruction. Ripple has no instrument against it. Stablecoins were a different story: there the issuers stepped in, but only for a vanishingly small share of the total.

For you as a holder, that raises a question worth answering before your next purchase: which of your holdings could anyone freeze at all, and who would that be? The answer differs for native coins and issued tokens, and it differs again between self-custody and an exchange account. This piece sorts out the technology, sets out the practical consequences, and shows where an account freeze also hits investors who had nothing to do with the theft.

What has happened since Thursday: 103 million XRP across five accounts

According to the company, assets were transferred to addresses controlled by the attacker at Bitget on Thursday, September 24, 2026. The damage figure has been revised upwards several times. The first estimate stood at 351.6 million dollars, shortly afterwards the figure quoted was 388 million, and on Friday the company named 387.5 million dollars. The platform attributes the increase to further transfers in Zcash and on Tron found while tracing the transactions, not to a second wave of attacks. We deliberately leave that range of 351.6 to 387.5 million dollars unsmoothed here, because it shows how uncertain the numbers are in the first days after an incident.