No, Wallet of Satoshi was not hacked

A Bitcoin user thought his Wallet of Satoshi had been hacked. His balance was draining in front of his eyes, with no outgoing payments to explain it. Here is what actually happened.

On September 11, Kristaps Kaupe posted on X that something strange was going on with his Wallet of Satoshi. He had sent sats from his own Lightning node to his Wallet of Satoshi wallet. The deposit showed up in his transaction history but never appeared in his balance. Then his balance started dropping on its own, slowly, with nothing in his history to explain it.

Scary stuff. The post was viewed tens of thousands of times, and people started asking whether Wallet of Satoshi or the Spark system behind it had been hacked.

It had not been hacked. His app was out of date.

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

He proved it himself the next day. He took his backup seed phrase and opened it in a different Spark wallet. His full balance was right there. As he put it: the bug was in the Wallet of Satoshi app, not in Spark itself.

So the bottom line: no hack, no missing money, nobody else affected. An outdated app showing the wrong balance.

But the panic points at something real. Wallets across the industry are moving users off custodial Lightning and onto Spark as the new self-custody standard, and those migrations have been bumpy. Users have run into balances not displaying correctly, features disappearing in the move, and forced updates that change how the wallet works underneath them. The technology may be the future, but the rollout is still rough around the edges.

The lesson for regular users is simple: when your wallet starts acting strange, update the app before you panic. And keep your seed phrase safe. It is the thing that proves your money is still yours, no matter what the app on your screen says.