Liquid wallet fell to 207 BTC after 3,998.5 BTC drain, with the flaw traced to Elements cache logic
Liquid Network’s federation wallet was drained of 3,998.5 BTC on Sept. 6, leaving just 207.275 BTC from a pre-incident balance of about 4,200 BTC, according to BlockTempo. The attacker later returned 3,400 BTC but kept 598.5 BTC, valued in the report at roughly $47.61 million. The key point in the incident, the report said, is that the breach did not come from Liquid’s 11-of-15 multisig being broken or from any stolen private keys. Instead, the issue was tied to how Elements, the Bitcoin Core fork used by Liquid nodes, indexed cached rangeproof validation data. That allowed the attacker to create L-BTC without matching BTC backing and then pass those assets through the normal peg-out process. BlockTempo also placed the event in the wider wrapped-Bitcoin market, noting that WBTC stood at $9.23 billion as of Sept. 9, or 27 times Liquid’s roughly $334 million scale before the exploit. At publication time, the Liquid network remained paused, bridge nodes were disabled, exchange deposits and withdrawals for L-BTC had not resumed, and Blockstream had not said who would absorb the remaining 598.5 BTC shortfall.








