Liquid ‘white hats’ return $270M in Bitcoin as network prepares restart
The actors returned 85% of the Bitcoin withdrawn from Liquid’s federation wallet following the security incident.
The actors returned 85% of the Bitcoin withdrawn from Liquid’s federation wallet following the security incident.
Purported white-hat hackers returned 3,400 Bitcoin worth about $270 million to the Liquid Federation wallet after withdrawing roughly $320 million from the Bitcoin sidechain’s reserves.
On Monday, JAN3 CEO and former Blockstream executive Samson Mow said the return followed confirmation from Blockstream that the affected bridge nodes had been patched. He said about 598 BTC remains outstanding and that Blockstream continues to engage with the actors.
The original withdrawal was processed through SideSwap’s Peg-out Authorization Key, although Liquid and SideSwap said the key itself was not compromised. SideSwap said the L-BTC involved originated from a bug in Elements, the open-source software underpinning Liquid.