No, Wallet of Satoshi Was Not Hacked

Last week, a guy thought his Wallet of Satoshi was being hacked. His balance was draining right in front of him. Here is what actually happened.

What he saw

On September 11, Kristaps Kaupe posted on X that sats he sent from his own Lightning node to his Wallet of Satoshi showed up in his transaction history but never in his balance. Then his balance started dropping on its own, with no outgoing payments anywhere. That is scary to watch, and the post pulled 33,000 views.

What it really was

It was not a hack. His app was out of date.

Wallet of Satoshi recently rebuilt the whole wallet on Spark, a new system from Lightspark for holding bitcoin. Kaupe had not updated, and the old app could not read his balance correctly after the backend changed. The money was never gone. The app was just showing the wrong number.

He proved it himself the next day. He took his backup seed and opened it in a different Spark wallet (BlitzWallet). Full balance, right there. His own words: "Seems to be @walletofsatoshi bug, not @spark in general."

So: no hack, no missing money, nobody else affected. An old app showing a wrong number.

The real story underneath

The panic points at something worth paying attention to. Wallets are moving users off custodial Lightning and onto Spark as the industry's self-custody answer, and these migrations have been bumpy. Features disappear in the move: on Blink, Learn and Circles are gone after the switch. Plenty of users have hit issues going from custodial Lightning to the new Spark-based versions, from balances not displaying right to forced updates that change how the wallet works under the hood.

Self-custody is the right direction. But the road there is going to keep producing scary-looking moments like this one. Update your apps, back up your seeds, and check before you panic.