Bitget hacker moves $83 million in stolen XRP that Ripple cannot freeze

Two wallets have been almost emptied and a third is being drained, with $75 million remaining across the five original holding accounts.

The hacker behind Bitget’s $387.5 million breach moved $83 million in stolen XRP from three holding wallets, while roughly $75 million remains in accounts that cannot be frozen under the XRP Ledger’s rules.

Exchanges can restrict accounts that receive the stolen XRP, but Ripple cannot block transactions from wallets controlled by the attacker; Circle and Tether have separately frozen $320,000 in related stablecoins.

Bitget said its protection fund will cover the losses and customer balances are unaffected, with withdrawals scheduled to resume in stages from Sept. 28 through Oct. 2.

Circle and Tether, the companies behind dollar-linked tokens USDC and USDT, have already frozen $320,000 in stablecoins connected to the breach. Their tokens contain controls that allow the companies to blacklist addresses.

The XRP transfers accelerated overnight. At 04:32 UTC Saturday, 70 million tokens remained in the original five accounts. Roughly eight hours later, that balance had fallen to 49 million.

Some payments followed routes already used by the first wallet. After an attempted transfer of 521,000 XRP failed because that account lacked sufficient funds, the second sent an identical amount to the intended recipient roughly an hour later.

54 million XRP has now left the original holding accounts. The transfers show the attacker distributing the stolen funds across more wallets, although they do not reveal how much has been sold.

XRP traded around $1.54 on Saturday, down 4% over 24 hours while retaining a weekly gain of 9%, according to CoinGecko.

At that price, the original XRP haul was worth roughly $160 million, or equivalent to 4% of the token’s $4.4 billion in reported daily trading volume. How much a sale would move the price depends on the buy orders available when it happens.

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