Bitcoin dipped toward $76,000, hackers returned most of the ~4,000 BTC withdrawn from Liquid, the Ethereum Foundation identified key EIPs for Hegota, and more from the week.
Hopes for fresh demand
Early in the week, bitcoin fell through $80,000. Analysts cited weak demand and long-term holders shifting toward distribution among the reasons for the move.
On September 11, after U.S. inflation data, bitcoin briefly dropped sharply to $76,000. It quickly recovered and made a short-lived attempt to retest $80,000.
Ahead of the weekend, bitcoin traded sideways, and Glassnode and CryptoQuant pointed to major resistance above, without clearing which sustained gains are unlikely.
At press time, bitcoin is holding $77,000, down about 3.4% for the week. Over the period, Ethereum hovered around $2,500, while TRON rose nearly 2%.
The rest of the top-10 altcoins saw deeper pullbacks than bitcoin. HYPE from Hyperliquid fell 12.2%, while Zcash and Solana declined 6.5% and 5.6%, respectively.
After three straight weeks of inflows, spot bitcoin ETFs lost nearly $463 million. Outflows and price weakness pushed total assets in the products back below $100 billion — down to $97 billion.
Ethereum funds, by contrast, attracted investments for a fourth consecutive week. The latest week saw more than $197 million of inflows. AUM recovered to $16.3 billion, levels last seen in January.
The crypto fear and greed index fell from 73 to 61. The gauge remained in positive territory, though near its lower bound.
The digital asset market capitalization fell from $2.7 trillion to $2.63 trillion. Bitcoin dominance is 58.8% (59.6% a week earlier), and Ethereum’s share is 11.6% (11.1%).
Unknown actors drained $320 million in bitcoin from Liquid Network, then returned ~85% of the coins
On September 6, unknown actors withdrew about 4,000 BTC worth roughly $320 million from the federation wallet of the Liquid Network bitcoin sidechain. It was the largest hack in the Bitcoin ecosystem in recent years.
They exploited a bug in Liquid’s software to mint L-BTC without a corresponding increase in bitcoin reserves, then swapped the tokens for bitcoin via SideSwap.
The recipients of the funds called themselves white hat hackers. In a transaction related to the incident, they left a message:
“We are white hat hackers. Contact us via the blockchain.”
Later, the hackers said they intended to return “most” of the funds after the vulnerability was fixed.
“After the fix is confirmed, we will transfer the money back,” one message said.
In response to the incident, developers disabled bridge nodes and halted new transactions, and notified exchanges to suspend L-BTC deposits and withdrawals. According to the Liquid team, other network assets — USDT, DePix and a number of RWA — were not affected.
On September 8, the hackers returned 3,400 BTC out of ~4,000 BTC taken from the federation wallet.
They retained about 598 BTC worth roughly $47 million — around 15% of the total. Both sides did not publicly comment on the fate of these assets for a time, but on September 11 the company behind Liquid, Blockstream, said it would not pay for the return of the stolen bitcoin. The team called holding the coins theft and said it would involve law enforcement, exchanges and blockchain investigators to find the perpetrators.
What to discuss with friends?
- Opinion: military conflicts accelerated crypto adoption in the Middle East.
- Ledger and Trezor called for coordinated vulnerability disclosure to become an industry norm.
- A former Anthropic developer accused AI corporations of posing a threat of human extinction.
- OpenAI asked Congress to clarify the legality of jointly slowing AI.
Hacken identifies critical risk in control of 91 billion USDT
About 91.3 billion USDT on TRON — roughly half of the market supply of the stablecoin — are governed by a contract that could be controlled if two signing keys are compromised, specialists from Hacken concluded.
The risk stems from an administrative multisig that controls the USDT contract itself. Through it, tokens can be minted, addresses frozen, and the contract owner reassigned.
Hacken emphasized it found no signs of key compromise or any incident to date. The company also noted that Tether uses the same six keys on Ethereum, Avalanche and Celo. This means compromising two reused keys could potentially affect other deployments of the stablecoin.
Separately, auditors noted that USDT smart contracts lack automatic reserve verification and an issuance cap: if signers approve a transaction, the contract will mint any amount of tokens without on-chain confirmation of a bank deposit.
IonQ outlines quantum computer power needed to attack bitcoin
A fault-tolerant quantum computer with roughly 20,000 physical qubits would need 26 days to break secp256k1 cryptography, IonQ estimated.
Researchers performed an end-to-end resource estimate for running Shor’s algorithm against secp256k1 — the elliptic curve used in bitcoin and several other cryptographic systems.
According to the calculations, solving the discrete logarithm problem would require 19,397 physical qubits, 1,457 logical qubits and about 39 million logical Toffoli gates. At that configuration, a single attempt would take roughly 25.7 days.
IonQ says it is the first to take such an estimate down to a specific quantum computer architecture: researchers accounted not only for the algorithm, but also the compiler, hardware architecture and error-correction system.
Also on ForkLog:
- Hackers targeted Trezor customers via a compromised mailing service.
- Arm brought together 80 companies to create a common standard for robot capabilities.
- LayerZero and a16z introduced a post-quantum proof system for blockchains.
- Republicans updated the CLARITY Act ahead of a Senate vote.
Ethereum Foundation identified two key EIPs for Hegota
On September 7, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) Protocol cluster published priorities for the Hegota upgrade. Of 62 improvement proposals (EIPs), two received the top S level, or must-ship: FOCIL (EIP-7805) and Frame Transactions (EIP-8141).
Developers simultaneously reaffirmed a goal to make Ethereum’s base layer resilient to quantum attacks at the execution, consensus and data layers by December 2029.
At the consensus layer, the main proposal will be FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists). A committee of several validators would assemble lists of transactions for inclusion. A block proposer must add operations that meet the set criteria; otherwise, attesting validators will not support the block.
The mechanism is intended to improve Ethereum’s censorship resistance and make it harder for a dominant builder to block individual transactions.
At the execution layer, EIP-8141 Frame Transactions has must-ship status. It moves account abstraction directly into the protocol and makes account verification, transaction execution and gas payment programmable.
For the post-quantum transition, Frame Transactions’ cryptographic flexibility is important. Accounts will be able to migrate to new signature schemes without a separate hard fork for each algorithm. Over time, this should allow abandoning secp256k1 keys that are vulnerable to quantum computers.
What else to read?
We examined the mechanisms behind “social media telepathy” and found it is more prosaic — yet scarier — than you might think.
We explored whether people are ready to let AI manage money and how the world regulates the new agent economy — from the boldest to the most conservative approaches.
In the final installment of the “Quantum & After” series, we looked at where quantum technologies already work as a tool and where commercial value remains a promise.
We compiled in a traditional digest the week’s most notable cybersecurity events.
