Liquid Network pauses after purported ‘white-hat’ hackers withdraw $320 million in bitcoin

BREAKING: Bitcoin sidechain Liquid Network paused after purported 'white-hat' hackers withdraw $320 million in bitcoin, with exchanges suspending LBTC deposits and withdrawals.

Someone just pulled 320 million dollars in bitcoin off the Liquid Network, and they're calling themselves white hats.

Liquid is a bitcoin sidechain, a layer built on top of the main chain, and right now it's paused. Frozen. Exchanges have suspended LBTC deposits and withdrawals while everyone works out what actually happened, and you can see the panic rippling through trading desks tonight.

Now, the white hat label is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. In crypto, that phrase usually means we took your money to prove we could, and we promise we'll give it back. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's a ransom negotiation wearing a nice suit. Three hundred and twenty million is not a proof of concept, that's a small country's reserves.

So the whole space is watching one wallet tonight. If those coins move toward a mixer instead of back home, the word white hat gets retired very quickly.

This is Angel Manalo, reporting for HIT.