Mysterious White Hat Hacker Drains $320 Million from Liquid Network

A mysterious transaction has drained approximately 4,200 BTC from the Liquid Network, worth around $320 million at current Bitcoin prices near $80,000.

The transfer occurred on September 6 and was carried out in a single peg-out transaction, with an OP_RETURN message embedded that identified the parties behind the move as 'white hats' and invited further communication on-chain.

The nature of the movement remains unclear, and it has not been confirmed whether this was an exploit of the network's security model or an authorized operation conducted by insiders.

Liquid Network is a Bitcoin sidechain built by Blockstream, which operates under a Strong Federation model relying on an 11-of-15 multisig arrangement to manage the underlying Bitcoin reserves backing L-BTC tokens.