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Company

Blockstream

Blockstream builds bitcoin infrastructure, including the Liquid Network sidechain, satellite-based Bitcoin broadcasting, mining services, and hardware wallets.

Known aliases

  • Blockstream Corp
  • Blockstream Inc.
  • Blockstream Research

Current stories

investConfirmed7 publishers

4,200 BTC walked off Liquid behind an on-chain note claiming white-hat intent

Blockstream has not said whether its 11-of-15 federation was bypassed or complied. Until someone publishes what share of Liquid's reserves left on September 6, an L-BTC balance is an unverified claim.

Perspective Coverage

7 publishers
Builder
Builder 30%
Operator
Operator 40%
Investor
Investor 30%

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives60
Confidence58
investConfirmed7 publishers

Blockstream bets forensic tracing beats paying a $32m bounty for the last 598.5 BTC

The attackers who drained 4,000 BTC from Liquid handed back 3,400 after the patch and kept 598.5. Blockstream puts about $47 million on that hold and says it will trace the coins instead of paying.

Perspective Coverage

7 publishers
Builder
Builder 24%
Operator
Operator 43%
Investor
Investor 33%

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives62
Confidence68
investOne report1 publisher

Unnamed Base vault loses $6 million to a whitelist flaw spotted a week earlier

About $6 million in wstETH left an unidentified Base vault via a whitelist flaw a researcher had found the week before, Immunefi says. Roughly $31.7 million remains under seven unnamed Safe signers who, more than a day later, had not claimed the vault or announced a fix.

Publishers:crypto.news

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives70
Confidence40
securityConfirmed7 publishers

Liquid's thieves set a patch as the price of returning 4,000 BTC

Blockstream paused the Liquid bridge after roughly 4,000 BTC left the federation wallet, and the people holding it will send most of it back only once the flaw is fixed, which puts the patch timetable in their hands.

Perspective Coverage

7 publishers
Builder
Builder 26%
Operator
Operator 41%
Investor
Investor 33%

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives55
Confidence70
productOne report1 publisher

Coldcard owners who held their own keys lost over $100 million to a firmware bug

Coinkite's Coldcard firmware skipped its hardware random number generator, letting attackers brute-force seeds and drain over $100 million in bitcoin. Liquid's later $320 million drain adds node software to the code a bitcoin holder has to trust.

Publishers:gizmodo.com

Reality

Evidence38
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence42
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Blockstream pauses Liquid after $320 million exploit, tries to reach hackers onchain

The withdrawal cleared every control the Liquid Federation actually operates, which is why an 11-of-15 quorum released the bitcoin in 23 minutes. Recovery now depends on whoever holds the coins answering an email address.

Publishers:news.bitcoin.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives55
Confidence55
productConfirmed5 publishers

Liquid's signers released 3,996 bitcoin because their own software said it was backed

The 11-of-15 federation multisig held and no key was stolen; the node software that tells signers whether a peg-out is backed carried a week-old bug, and about $320m walked out of Blockstream's sidechain.

Perspective Coverage

5 publishers
Builder
Builder 27%
Operator
Operator 39%
Investor
Investor 34%

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives55
Confidence60
investOne report1 publisher

Swiss Bitcoin Pay pulled its whole server fleet offline over five fields of customer data

The payment firm says its servers went dark on September 14 after an intruder probably reached internal systems, and that customer emails, IBANs, transaction histories and hashed passwords may have been exposed.

Reality

Evidence34
Adoption38
Hype gap+18
Incentives68
Confidence45
investConfirmed3 publishers

Ten days of maintainer time bought Core Lightning a two-week embargo on AI-found bugs

Core Lightning says the machine-written reports found real flaws in its payments software. It is holding the count and severity for at least two weeks, leaving node operators to decide what to do with a hazard whose size is still private.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 28%
Operator
Operator 52%
Investor
Investor 20%

Reality

Evidence60
Adoption40
Hype gap+25
Incentives68
Confidence62
investOne report1 publisher

The attacker's self-set 15% leaves Liquid's peg wallet about 600 BTC short

SlowMist says a cache key collision in Blockstream's Elements let an attacker mint 3,998.5 L-BTC and peg them out for real Bitcoin. About 3,400 BTC came back after the patch, leaving the pool near 3,597.

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption72
Hype gap+20
Incentives65
Confidence55
investOne report1 publisher

Capital B bought its latest 376 bitcoin at 23 per cent below its own cost basis

A Paris-listed company holding 3,521 coins says it wants one per cent of all Bitcoin, and the distance between those two numbers is the story the Euronext turnover ranking is being asked to carry.

Reality

Evidence30
Adoption36
Hype gap+55
Incentives70
Confidence38
productOne report1 publisher

A node bug made Liquid's 11-of-15 multisig pay out on coins that never existed

Blockstream's federation signers behaved correctly and still released roughly 4,000 bitcoin, because the software that decides what counts as a real L-BTC is a different system from the keys guarding the peg.

Publishers:gizmodo.com

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption45
Hype gap+12
Incentives66
Confidence55
investOne report1 publisher

Liquid's $320M peg-out ran on an authorization key reported unbreached

Some 3,996 BTC left the Liquid Federation on Sunday through the one control designed to stop exactly that, which makes the open question where in the path the authorization came from, not whether the takers are honest.

Reality

Evidence52
Adoption45
Hype gap+8
Incentives65
Confidence48
investOne report1 publisher

Remixpoint sells four altcoins worth 4.5% of its crypto book to become bitcoin-only

Buyers in Japan, France, the UK and Dallas all added bitcoin in the same week; the Singapore name in the group sold its whole stack this year to repay $8.5m of debt, which is what a forced seller looks like.

Reality

Evidence48
Adoption63
Hype gap+37
Incentives72
Confidence52
investOne report1 publisher

Solana validators cancel 18.9 million SOL of issuance over the next six years

A stakeholder vote has shortened Solana's issuance curve by years. The same week, Bitcoin researchers filed a post-quantum signature proposal whose cost is measured in block space. Both are trade-offs somebody has to price.

Reality

Evidence38
Adoption52
Hype gap+18
Incentives62
Confidence45
productOne report1 publisher

A quantum-resistant bitcoin spend clears mainnet under today's consensus rules

Gizmodo reports that a StarkWare researcher's transaction needed no soft fork. That fact moves post-quantum migration out of the developer debate and into the custody workflow, where somebody has to schedule it and pay for it.

Publishers:gizmodo.com

Reality

Evidence42
Adoption18
Hype gap+20
Incentives62
Confidence45
investOne report1 publisher

Bitcoin's first post-quantum signature BIP arrives with its tradeoffs already conceded

Blockstream's SHRINCS is the first post-quantum signature scheme written to Bitcoin's block economics, and Jonas Nick says up front it is not optimal. The argument now is about price.

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption22
Hype gap+12
Incentives68
Confidence48
investOne report1 publisher

Bitcoin's cross-layer plumbing had one supplier, and the stand-in is still invite-only

Blockstream opened a beta of its atomic swap service a week after Boltz went dark. General availability has no date, and wallet teams are the ones carrying that gap.

Reality

Evidence44
Adoption19
Hype gap+27
Incentives68
Confidence52

Earlier coverage