Bitget CEO Gracy Chen has publicly asked Thorchain to block the addresses behind the exchange's hack, which she says has now grown to $387.5 million. Thorchain faced the same request after the Bybit hack and kept running anyway, and its response to Chen signals little has changed.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen is asking Thorchain to cut off the addresses draining her exchange, arguing that decentralization shouldn't shield stolen funds. She made the request on X on Saturday, two days after Bitcoin.com News first reported the breach. According to Chen: "Decentralization is a design principle, not a shield for facilitating known stolen funds."
The hack's toll climbs past $350 million
Bitget initially put the damage at around $351 million, but the exchange now estimates that approximately $387.5 million were transferred to attacker-controlled addresses. The attacker has been moving the stolen funds across several rails, including Thorchain, Chainflip, Uniswap, 1inch Fusion, Stargate, Across, and Relay.
Several reports say tens of millions in XRP have been deposited into Thorchain vaults, with another tens-of-millions stash already swapped for bitcoin. The bitcoin is then peeled and hopped across many addresses, a pattern that pushed Chen to publicly call on Thorchain to refuse service to the attacker's wallets, since they are publicly listed and actively tracked.
A repeat of the Bybit standoff
Thorchain has been here before. During the Bybit hack, the network moved $1.2 to $1.5 billion in stolen funds, and the FBI asked the industry to block the DPRK-linked addresses involved.
Three of Thorchain's validators voted to halt ETH trading at the time, but four validators reversed that decision half an hour later, and the network kept running. A developer quit over the episode.
Thorchain can halt itself entirely when its own operators choose to. After the May 2026 GG20 exploit drained about $10.7 to $11 million from one of its vaults, operators paused the network for weeks while they patched it.
But that pause was the protocol defending itself, not blocking an outside attacker's funds on request. Thorchain's official account replied to Chen on Saturday, framing itself as decentralized and permissionless like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB Chain, and asking what responsibility those networks would bear in the same situation.
Source: Bitcoin News
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