Liquid Network Hacked for $320 Million in Bitcoin
nashnova research
Hackers drained roughly 4,000 BTC ($320 million) from Liquid Network's federated custody wallet via settlement platform SideSwap — wiping out 95% of its reserves and forcing the sidechain offline.
What exactly happened?
Liquid Network's federated wallet held about 4,200 BTC. Roughly 4,000 of them — worth ~$320 million — were moved out, about 95% of total reserves.
The funds were transferred through SideSwap, an authorized settlement platform, but Liquid stressed that private keys were not compromised.
This means → the breach was not a stolen key. The attacker exploited an authorized channel — walking through the front door, not the back.
Where was the vulnerability?
FailSafe CEO Aneirin Flynn said early evidence points to a code bug that allowed L-BTC to be minted out of thin air.
In plain terms = the attacker found a flaw that let them "print" Liquid Bitcoin (L-BTC) from nothing, then redeem it for real BTC.
Flynn said the incident "exposes critical flaws in Liquid's validation and reserve model" — with ~95% of reserves drained, the network had to shut down.
What is Liquid Network?
Liquid was created by blockchain firm Blockstream in 2018. It is now managed by a federation of over 80 exchanges, infrastructure companies, and asset managers.
Its core function: issue L-BTC — a sidechain token pegged 1:1 to mainchain BTC — to speed up settlements and bypass Bitcoin's high fees and congestion.
Listed users include BTSE, Bitfinex (under the same holding company as Tether's parent), and BitMEX, which announced its closure this month.
A "white-hat hacker" — will the funds come back?
Liquid described the attacker as a "so-called white-hat hacker" — someone who typically moves funds after finding a vulnerability, then returns them in exchange for a bounty.
This means → if the attacker is indeed a white hat, recovery via negotiation plus bounty is plausible — but that is Liquid's characterization alone, still unverified.
Neither Liquid Network nor Blockstream has responded to media inquiries. When the network resumes — and whether the funds are recovered — remains the biggest open question.
Why is crypto infrastructure security under siege?
This is not an isolated event. Last week, a digital-asset lending platform linked to Crypto.com lost $6 million to hackers.
In August, offline Bitcoin hardware wallet Coldcard was attacked, raising doubts about cold-storage security.
This reflects a deeper pattern: from sidechains to lending platforms to hardware wallets, crypto's security gaps are spreading from exchanges to the entire infrastructure stack.
市场有风险，内容仅供研究参考，不构成投资建议。