Bitcoin News

Story: Coldcard Breach Pushes 39,600 Bitcoin Into Sub-1 BTC Transfers

By Bruce Buterin

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The Hack Is Still Running. The Coldcard breach didn't wrap up neatly. It's still active.

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Self-Custody Takes Another Hit — Or Does It?. The Coldcard hack reignited a fight that never really goes away in Bitcoin circles: is…

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What Users Are Actually Doing. Forget the debate for a second — the on-chain data tells you what people chose. They moved funds.

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Bitcoin users panicked. Fast. And the numbers back it up — 39,600 BTC moved in small transactions under 1 BTC on Friday, the biggest single-day volume of sub-1 BTC transfers…

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The comparison to FTX isn't casual. Per CryptoQuant head of research Julio Moreno, Friday's figure came just shy of the 39,900 BTC shifted on November 16, 2022 — the chaotic days…

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The Coldcard breach didn't wrap up neatly. It's still active. Researchers are still finding new victims.

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Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital, went straight to social media with a warning: move your funds out of Coldcard-generated addresses now. Not later.

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It's unclear exactly how the attackers are exploiting the vulnerability, and no full technical post-mortem has been published yet.

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Casa CEO Nick Neuman came out defending it. His argument — the decentralized nature of self-custody has protected far more Bitcoin than was lost in the hack.

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Read also: Canadian Entrepreneur Loses $1.6M in Bitcoin as Coldcard Seed Flaw Hits 4,585 Wallets

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But critics aren't buying it wholesale. Some point out that the Coldcard incident is a failure of one specific wallet provider, not a flaw in the idea of self-custody itself.

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On the other side, traditional finance voices are pushing ETFs as the cleaner option. No seed phrases, no hardware, no worrying about whether your wallet firmware has a zero-day.

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The debate's genuinely split. And it's not resolving anytime soon.

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That's the thing about a hardware wallet breach. It's personal. It's not an exchange going under where you hope the lawyers recover something.

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More context: CoinFlip-Style Hardware Hack: $70 Million Gone From 1,196 Coldcard Wallets

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