US Bitcoin ETF Inflows Continue as Circle and Tether Freeze Bitget Hack Funds

The first days of the fourth quarter are shaping up as a test of how far institutional confidence in crypto can stretch — and how fast the industry's safety nets can respond when something goes wrong. Two developments from the past 24 hours capture both sides of that story: a steady drip of new institutional money into US spot Bitcoin funds, and a rapid, if partial, response from stablecoin issuers after one of the year's larger exchange hacks.

US Spot Bitcoin ETFs Extend Their Inflow Streak

US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in a net $134.46 million on September 25, marking a seventh consecutive day of positive flows, according to data compiled by Trader T. BlackRock's IBIT once again led the category with $96.99 million, followed by Fidelity's FBTC at $49.32 million. Bitwise's BITB was the outlier, shedding $11.85 million, while the remaining funds saw no meaningful flow either way.

The streak follows a stronger run earlier in the week: a record-setting $999 million single-day inflow on September 21 — the largest since October 2025 — helped push Bitcoin briefly above $87,000 for the first time since January. Prices have since eased back toward the mid-$80,000s, and daily inflows have cooled from that peak, but the six-to-seven-day run has still added more than $2.8 billion in fresh capital to the category. BlackRock's IBIT alone now holds more than $65 billion in cumulative net inflows, underscoring how concentrated the institutional demand for Bitcoin exposure has become around a handful of issuers.

Notably, the buying has continued despite headlines that might otherwise have cooled sentiment, including the US Senate's failure to advance the CLARITY Act last week. Traders appear to be weighing what regulators can still do administratively over what Congress has not yet passed into law — a dynamic that has so far kept the rally intact.

Circle and Tether Move Quickly After the Bitget Hack

The second story shows the other half of crypto's infrastructure in action: damage control. Bitget's security systems flagged unauthorized transfers from several hot wallets at 18:31 UTC on September 24, in what the exchange later confirmed was a $351.6 million breach. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said the attackers compromised a backend system tied to the exchange's wallet infrastructure and spoofed transaction data to trigger its approval mechanism — not, she stressed, a stolen private key. Cold storage reserves were unaffected, and Bitget has pointed to its $464 million user protection fund as sufficient to cover the loss.

What happened next is where US-based stablecoin issuers entered the picture. Onchain data shows Circle blacklisted a wallet labeled "Bitget Exploiter 8" at 05:00 UTC on September 26, roughly ten hours after the breach was detected. Tether followed with its own blacklist action on the same address shortly after, according to blockchain security firm MistTrack. Together, the two freezes locked up about $318,000 combined — 99,990 USDC and 218,023 USDT — held in that single wallet.

The catch: it's a small fraction of the total haul. The same wallet also held roughly 170 ETH, and trackers show other addresses tied to the attacker still hold more than 63,000 ETH, an asset neither issuer has any mechanism to freeze. The response nonetheless marks a notably faster turnaround than Circle's handling of April's Drift protocol hack, when critics said roughly $232 million in stolen USDC moved across chains before any blacklisting occurred.

The Bigger Picture for US Crypto Markets

Taken together, these two stories tell a consistent story about where crypto stands heading into the fourth quarter: institutional capital keeps flowing into regulated, US-listed products even as the underlying infrastructure still has real security gaps. ETF demand shows that large allocators are comfortable treating Bitcoin as a standing part of a portfolio, regardless of short-term political setbacks like the stalled CLARITY Act. At the same time, the Bitget incident is a reminder that exchange-level security remains a live risk, and that the tools available to limit the damage — stablecoin blacklisting chief among them — only reach part of what's actually stolen once funds move into non-freezable assets like ETH. For US investors and platforms alike, both trends are likely to keep shaping the conversation well into October.