Blink Wallet Pauses Services After Attacker Drains Custodial Accounts

Blink, the Bitcoin Lightning Network payments app that grew out of El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach initiative, halted all of its services on September 19 after discovering that an attacker had drained funds from a limited number of its custodial accounts.

The company’s official status page logged the event as a critical “custodial accounts” incident and marked it resolved the following morning. Blink positions itself as the everyday Bitcoin wallet for circular-economy projects across El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Kenya.

A Custodial Breach, Not a Self-Custody Problem The incident hit custodial accounts specifically — wallets where Blink holds the private keys on behalf of users.

Non-custodial users, who manage their own keys through Blink’s Spark protocol, were not affected, and the company was explicit that Spark was not implicated.