Liquid Network Hit with $319M Bitcoin Heist by 'White Hat' Hackers
A significant amount of Bitcoin has been taken from the Liquid Network, with hackers claiming to be 'white hats'. The incident saw around 4,000 BTC worth $319 million stolen from the network. According to an unverified OP_RETURN message, the attackers stated they are whitehats and provided a contact address on the blockchain.
The Liquid explorer shows that the balance of its federation wallet dropped from 4,200 BTC to just 207.275 BTC after the incident. The funds were withdrawn via Sideswap's Peg-out Authorization Key (PAK), but neither Sideswap nor any other keys were compromised, according to Liquid Network.
The security breach has raised questions about the safety of the sidechain, with crypto analyst DBCrypto stating that 'the coins aren't running and they're just sitting on Bitcoin and haven't been mixed. That's more consistent with a whitehat extraction than a theft.'
Blockstream has since established that the L-BTC in question was created through a bug in the Elements software.