Liquid Network has said a hacker stole thousands of bitcoins from its federation wallet.
Different outlets have valued the theft at roughly $320 million to $340 million.
Why the outage matters
Liquid is a Bitcoin settlement network used by several cryptocurrency exchanges.
The company paused its services while it investigated and repaired the system.
A hack with a twist
The attacker allegedly exploited a withdrawal bug to drain the funds from the network.
They reportedly said they would return the coins once the underlying vulnerability was fixed, prompting some reports to describe the theft as "white-hat" in nature, a term used for hacks intended to expose flaws rather than purely to profit from them.
Blockstream, the company behind Liquid, patched the issue.
According to the company and subsequent reporting, the attacker then sent back roughly 3,400 of the roughly 4,000 stolen bitcoins, while keeping about 600 bitcoins for themselves.
Part of a wider pattern
The incident ranks as one of the largest crypto thefts of the year so far.
It also comes amid a steady stream of high-value breaches across the sector, which outlets have described as the latest in an ongoing spate of hacks.
Prices across the market moved lower following the news, with most large cryptocurrencies trading down during US hours.
What happens next
"We will not restart operations until additional fixes and security improvements are made," former Blockstream executive Samson Mow wrote on X, summarising the network's immediate next step.
