Stolen XRP on the Move
The attacker behind Bitget's security breach had moved about $83 million in stolen XRP from several initial holding wallets by Saturday, according to a review of XRP Ledger transactions. Roughly 103 million XRP had been taken and distributed among five accounts. The rapid movement illustrates the short window available to exchanges trying to identify proceeds before they are converted, transferred again or received by other platforms.
The XRP Ledger does not give Ripple a general power to freeze native XRP held in an ordinary wallet. An exchange can restrict an account that receives identified stolen funds, and issuers of some other tokens can freeze their own assets, but those controls differ from an ability to stop all XRP transfers at the network level. Circle and Tether separately froze a much smaller amount of related stablecoins.
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That difference often disappears in broad descriptions of a “crypto freeze.” Each asset has its own rules and intermediaries. Investigators need to know whether funds remain in native tokens, have reached a cooperative exchange or have been swapped into assets whose issuers can intervene. An address visible on a public ledger can be easy to track while still being difficult to control.
Bitget said its protection fund would cover the incident and that customer balances were unaffected. It scheduled withdrawals to return in stages beginning September 28 and continuing through October 2. For the market, the case connects two forms of risk: a security failure at a centralized exchange and the limited ability of outside parties to reverse transfers once native assets leave its custody.
