The Coldcard hack is looking more and more like a crypto news story. Except that the real story is not hidden in the 130 million stolen… It is hidden in the 15 billion dollars that leaked in bitcoin transfer.
In brief
- 15 billion versus 130 million: for every dollar stolen during the Coldcard hack, around a hundred dollars were moved out of caution to more secure wallets.
- A 5-year-old flaw, flushed out by AI: the entropy bug has been dormant in Coldcard’s public code since 2021. It took an AI to spot it.
- Defense must now run at the speed of attack: diversifying your wallets reduces risk without eliminating it. The real line of defense involves being quick to audit your own code.
Bitcoin: 15 billion dollars gone to safety after the Coldcard heist
While the hackers were cracking Coldcard’s bitcoin wallets one after the other, something else was happening… Much more massive… And silently. Casa CEO Nick Neuman reveals a colossal movement of 233,000 BTC, or approximately $15 billion, which left wallets held for more than 155 days. This category that analysts monitor as the barometer of serious, patient investors, not the type to panic over a tweet. The funny thing is that some of this volume didn’t even come from Coldcard users.
But Ledger and Trezor holders who took advantage of the shock to migrate to multisigbecause they are afraid of perhaps being next on the list. For every dollar stolen, a hundred dollars were moved out of caution, and Glassnode confirms the scale of the movement. The reserve of long-term holders increased from almost 15 million bitcoins to around 14.7 million. The biggest weekly decline since December 2024. For Neuman, this is proof that distributed self-custody works like an immune system, not a weakness.
AI, the new enemy of cold wallets?
The hacking of Coldcard’s bitcoin wallets is now more than just a news item. On Bloomberg, Ledger’s Ian Rogers explained that AI has changed the very nature of the threat. Not by creating new vulnerabilities. By giving attackers radically faster discovery tools. Charles Guillemet, CTO of Ledger, goes further: this flaw lay dormant for five years in public code, until an attacker used AI to spot it. Five years. Proof that being open source and being truly audited are not the same thing…
A publicly searchable GitHub repository since 2021 is no good until no one bothers to actually look at it. An incident which now sounds like a warning for all companies developing Bitcoin hardware or software. It would then be necessary to urgently review the sensitive code, before a malicious AI takes care of it in its place. The defense must now run at the same speed as the attack. Which, let’s face it, doesn’t really leave any room for a nap between two audits.
After the hack of Coldcard’s Bitcoin (BTC) wallets, the solution would be to diversify your wallets between several manufacturers, which reduces the risk, without ever completely eliminating it. Nothing in crypto security is 100% guaranteed. The real line of defense is no longer limited to hardware today… It also involves the speed at which each actor in the ecosystem audits its own code. This, before a malicious AI does it first.
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