Bitcoin News
By Dan Saada
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The Bug That Started It All. The breach was traced back to a bug in Elements — the open-source software that powers Liquid's…
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White-Hat Claims Draw Skepticism. Not everyone's buying the ethical hacker story. Charles Guillemet, CTO of Ledger, went on record…
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What the Incident Means for Liquid Users. Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain built for faster, more confidential transactions — it's used by…
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Purported white-hat hackers sent roughly $270 million in Bitcoin back to the Liquid Federation wallet. Not all of it, though.
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The whole mess started when about 4,000 BTC was pulled from Liquid's federation wallet — a wallet that originally held around 4,200 BTC.
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Blockstream has been pushing software updates across the network and working directly with federation members to coordinate a restart.
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JAN3 CEO Samson Mow told users to hold off on sending Bitcoin to Liquid peg-in addresses until the network is confirmed fully operational.
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More context: Liquid Network Reclaims 3,400 Bitcoin, $47 Million Still Missing in Ongoing Negotiations
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Neither Blockstream nor Liquid has publicly commented on any repayment terms. No one's called it a bounty. No one's confirmed there's a deal in place.
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That silence is doing a lot of work here. Without a clear statement, the 598 BTC sits in an awkward legal and ethical gray zone. Did the hackers keep it as compensation?
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Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain built for faster, more confidential transactions — it's used by exchanges, traders, and institutions that need settlement speed that the base…
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The hackers' decision to return funds was, per what Blockstream shared, contingent on the vulnerabilities being patched and all nodes confirmed updated.
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Blockstream has been proactive in the technical response, by most accounts. Updates are being deployed. Federation members are being coordinated. The chain split is being resolved.
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More context: Blockstreams Liquid Network Suspended as 4,000 Bitcoin Bug Exposed, Draining $320 Million
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And the 598 BTC question won't go away on its own. Guillemet's framing — that keeping unreturned funds looks like extortion — is probably the view a lot of people in the industry…
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