Bitcoin holds near $64,000 as BTCPay backers pledge 3 BTC exploit bounty

On Monday, Bitcoin hardly shifted at all and was traded around the figure of $64,000; meanwhile, supporters of BTCPay Server promised a bounty of up to 3 $BTC to recover stolen funds that resulted from a critical weakness in the open-source payment software.

The lack of enthusiasm means that traders likely view the event as a threat to merchants and Lightning users but not to Bitcoin. The market value of Bitcoin was estimated to be $1.28 trillion, and it had experienced a drop of approximately half a percent according to CoinMarketCap. The hack influenced software built on top of Bitcoin rather than the network itself.

Prices held while some Lightning nodes drained

On August 7, BTCPay Server revealed that the vulnerability was actively being abused and encouraged its users to upgrade to version 2.4.2 or stop their servers until they have a chance to fix the problem. Among the users who reported that their Lightning nodes were attacked were Foundation and Citadel21. However, BTCPay did not provide the total amount of loss or the number of affected nodes.

The project said its own onchain wallets, including hot wallets, were not affected. Instead, attackers could obtain LND administrator macaroon credentials from vulnerable BTCPay instances and use them to control connected Lightning wallets.