4200 BTC.
Wake up, and only 207 are left.
95% of the reserves vanished on a Sunday.
$320 million.
Not a hacked exchange.
It was the “vault” of a Bitcoin sidechain that got emptied.
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Liquid Network.
A Bitcoin sidechain built by Blockstream.
Adam Back’s company.
An early reader of Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper.
Liquid uses a federation multisig to custody BTC and issues the pegged token LBTC.
15 institutional members co-sign.
11 signatures can move the vault.
This system had run for 7 years.
Never had a problem.
Until yesterday.
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September 6, Sunday.
A peg-out transaction transferred 4,019 BTC from the federation wallet.
Worth $320 million.
Embedded in the transaction was an OP_RETURN message:
“We are whitehats. Contact us on chain.”
We are white hats. Contact us on chain.
---
Blockstream replied with an address.
And left a message: “Please contact security@blockstream.com”
The hacker replied: “Please contact us on Signal @m671aw.70”
The two sides were talking across the Bitcoin chain.
A $320 million negotiation written into the blockchain.
Anyone can see it.
No one can change it.
---
The technical details slowly emerged.
There was suspicion of an inflation bug on the LBTC sidechain.
The hacker seemingly minted more than 4,000 nonexistent LBTC out of thin air.
Then used those LBTC, via SideSwap’s peg-out authorization key, to redeem real BTC.
The HSM security servers used by the 15-party multisig signed everything because the transaction “looked valid.”
The 11-of-15 threshold was built on one premise: all LBTC were backed by real BTC.
Once that premise was gone,
those 11 keys became rubber stamps.
---
Ledger’s CTO was the first to question it.
“The whitehat claim is exactly the same as the Ronin bridge hacker’s story.”
In 2022, Ronin was hacked for $620 million.
The hacker also said they were doing it for the principle, not the money.
In the end, the funds were never returned.
JAN3 CEO Samson Mow said Aqua Wallet’s Liquid features had been affected.
Exchanges were told to pause LBTC deposits and withdrawals.
The sidechain has been halted.
People holding LBTC can only wait now.
Wait for the hacker and Blockstream to negotiate.
Wait to see whether the $320 million comes back.
---
You may ask: does this have anything to do with the Bitcoin mainnet?
No.
The BTC mainnet lost no blocks.
No transaction was altered.
What was emptied was the sidechain vault, not the mainnet.
But the problem is not the mainnet.
The problem is trust.
---
Liquid’s selling point is “federated trust.”
15 well-known institutions co-sign.
Safer than single-custody.
More flexible than mainnet multisig.
That narrative ran for 7 years.
Now 4,000 BTC moved with a single OP_RETURN.
If the inflation bug is real, then what was broken wasn’t the 15 keys.
It was the whole assumption that “federation = security.”
---
Over the past month:
In August, BTC rose 25.6%.
ETF inflows reached $3.52 billion.
On September 3, daily ETF net inflows hit $731 million.
BlackRock publicly called BTC a global monetary alternative.
Institutions are accelerating their BTC accumulation.
At the same time, a sidechain vault got emptied.
The mainnet is getting stronger.
The sidechain is being exposed.
---
The hacker’s address hasn’t moved the 4,000 BTC at all.
Negotiations are still ongoing.
There have been white hats in history who really did return the money.
Euler Finance was hacked for $200 million in 2023, and everything was returned.
Poly Network was hacked for $600 million in 2021, and it was also returned.
But there have also been cases where someone claimed to be a white hat and never returned anything.
$320 million.
Enough to buy a good story.
Also enough to make a sidechain lose trust.
---
Bitcoin on the mainnet is still the same Bitcoin.
21 million coins.
Not one more, not one less.
But the 4,000 LBTC that appeared out of thin air on the sidechain are a reminder of one thing:
Bitcoin’s security does not mean everything built “on Bitcoin” is secure.
The vault can be rebuilt.
Trust does not come back that quickly.
$BTC #Bitcoin #LiquidNetwork #链上安全 #sidechain
Not investment advice