Liquid Gets 3,400 BTC Back After On-Chain Talks; White Hats Keep 598.5 BTC

The “White hat” party that withdrew nearly 4,000 bitcoin from the Liquid Network federation wallet on Sunday returned 3,400 BTC to the wallet on Monday. About 598 BTC, or 15% of the consolidated pile, stayed at the same holder address as an implied bounty fee worth 48 million dollars.

The return transaction (bc49a46d), confirmed at 16:09 UTC on September 7. It returned exactly 3,400 BTC to the labeled Liquid peg script address and sent the 598.5 BTC change back to the “White hat” hacker address as change. 

The transfer followed a day of messages written into Bitcoin blocks. The White hats first published transaction on chain with a message in the OP_RETURN arbitrary data field “contact us on chain”; the message came from the address holding the 4000 BTC taken from the Liquid Network. 

A Blockstream-linked address answered with “Please contact [email protected]”. Later notes from that sender carried Electrum-encrypted payloads and PGP signatures that can be verified against Blockstream’s published security key.

In block 965869, the White hats asked in the clear text whether sending “most” back to the federation script was acceptable. The 1,000-sat output on that transaction was only a message carrier.