Bitcoin News
By Steven Anderson
1 / 15
How the 4,000 BTC Left the Network. The sequence started simply enough. A customer moved 4,000 L-BTC to Sideswap's peg-out service.
2 / 15
Samson Mow, Confidential Transactions, and the AI Question. Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3, weighed in pretty quickly. He said the problem seems tied to Liquid's…
3 / 15
What Blockstream Is Doing Now. Blockstream is working to get the network back up. The immediate priority is re-establishing…
4 / 15
Blockstream pulled the plug on its Liquid Network Sunday. White hat hackers had just walked out with roughly 4,000 BTC — around $320 million — after finding and exploiting a bug…
5 / 15
The whole thing came to light through blockchain analyst Ergo BTC, who caught the withdrawal and flagged it publicly. From there, the crypto community basically lit up.
6 / 15
Blockstream later confirmed the L-BTC involved was created because of a bug in the Elements software.
7 / 15
Exchanges got instructions to suspend L-BTC deposits and withdrawals immediately. No timeline was given for when that changes.
8 / 15
Ledger's CTO Charles Guillemet wasn't fully buying the white hat narrative. He pointed out that the hackers asked to be contacted on Signal — which isn't exactly standard…
9 / 15
Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3, weighed in pretty quickly. He said the problem seems tied to Liquid's Confidential Transactions feature, though developers haven't confirmed that.
10 / 15
JAN3's own Aqua Wallet has Liquid functionality, and Mow said that's affected. Standard Bitcoin transactions through the wallet, though, are fine.
11 / 15
More context: British Investor Recovers $4.5 Million in 5,500 Bitcoin After a Decade of Loss
12 / 15
The community's response ranged from concerned to furious. Some called for the Elements software to be pulled entirely.
13 / 15
There's also a weird thread running through the discussion: speculation that AI, or specifically Large Language Models, might have been the tool that found the bug.
14 / 15
Blockstream is working to get the network back up. The immediate priority is re-establishing contact with the white hats to understand exactly what they did and how.
15 / 15
The technical teams are going through node-level operations carefully, trying to isolate whatever triggered the bug without disturbing PAKs or HSMs. That work is ongoing.
The Currency Analytics
Want the full story?