Bitcoin Steadies Near $64,000 as Coldcard Hack Losses Exceed $100 Million, Stolen Funds Move to Mixers

Bitcoin steadied on Tuesday, gaining 0.9% to $64,267.64 as of early evening Aug. 4, according to Nasdaq. Ethereum rose 0.5% to $1,874.13 and Solana gained 0.6% to $74.13. The move came as renewed optimism over the possible reopening of the Strait of Hormuz boosted broader risk sentiment, though the ongoing Coldcard hack continued to weigh on investor minds.

The exploit, which targeted cold wallets hosted by Canada-based Coinkite, has become the third-largest crypto hack of 2026. Galaxy Digital estimated at least $100 million in Bitcoin was stolen from roughly 7,300 wallets across three confirmed attack waves. The firm identified a suspected fourth wave that could bring total losses to about $130 million. DefiLlama’s hack tracker pegged losses at $115 million, while Galaxy Research earlier estimated around $110 million, a figure that grew to at least 7,300 wallets by Monday, according to Futurism.

The attackers exploited a software bug that allowed them to reconstruct wallet seed phrases, the sequences of random words that act as master keys to offline wallets. Coinkite warned customers on July 30, but the company has refused to independently confirm the scale of losses. “We’re not in a position to independently confirm total losses or validate the specific figures being reported by third parties,” the company told Bloomberg, as reported by Futurism. Coinkite said it is conducting a “post-mortem” and an “ongoing ecosystem-wide security audit” that has revealed “numerous critical bugs in key software systems across the ecosystem using frontier AI models.”

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reported that a firmware bug from March 2021 weakened seed randomness on some Coldcard wallets, cutting key strength to 40 bits from 128 bits, making it “brute-forceable without physical access.” TRM Labs also said differences in transaction construction during each attack wave hint at multiple attackers, in line with Galaxy’s earlier finding of at least 15 different exploiters.

**Hackers Begin Moving Stolen Funds**

On-chain tracking by blockchain security platform CertiK showed that about 64 Bitcoin, worth $4.17 million, was sent from address bc1q0 to the Wasabi mixing protocol on Tuesday. Separately, 200 Ether, worth $380,000, was transferred to Tornado Cash on Wednesday. “We think it might be a smaller exploiter. There’s likely a few copycats after the initial exploit,” a CertiK spokesperson told Cointelegraph.

Mixing protocols like Wasabi and Tornado Cash pool and scramble cryptocurrency from multiple users, breaking the traceable on-chain link between senders and recipients, making asset recovery difficult. TRM Labs reported that the majority of victim funds remained pooled in a small number of attacker-controlled addresses with limited mixing attempts, suggesting the exploiters are still in the early stages of laundering.

**July Becomes Second-Worst Month for Crypto Thefts**

The Coldcard exploit was the largest single incident in a month that saw total crypto thefts reach $247.4 million, according to DefiLlama data cited by Cointelegraph. That made July the second-worst month of 2026, trailing only April’s $644 million in losses. The July total was more than triple the $75 million stolen in June and the $60 million stolen in May.

Other notable July exploits included a $9 million hack against decentralized finance protocol Bonzo Lend, $2.6 million stolen from Cardano-based wallet SecondFi, $24 million stolen from Arbitrum-based perpetual exchange AFX, and $7.5 million stolen through the Verus Ethereum Bridge.

“July showed that even cold storage does not eliminate technological risks, which can put thousands of wallets at risk simultaneously,” research platform CryptoRank said in a post on X.

**Whale Accumulation and Market Signals**

Despite the hack, institutional interest in Bitcoin remained intact. Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw over $170 million in inflows on Aug. 3, with the majority going to the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, according to Nasdaq. A major Italian bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, reduced its Bitcoin ETF position while tripling its holdings in the iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF. Meanwhile, Hashdex announced it will close the Hashdex Bitcoin ETF due to insufficient funds.

Blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant reported that large Bitcoin holders, excluding exchanges and mining pools, have been accumulating. Whale holdings rose to about 3.06 million BTC from 2.87 million BTC in December 2025, with accumulation accelerating after Bitcoin dropped below $60,000 in June. Ethereum wallets holding 10,000 to 100,000 ETH collectively held a record 19.6 million ETH, while wallets holding more than 100,000 ETH added roughly 1.8 million ETH since mid-2025.

CryptoQuant pointed to realized price — the market’s average on-chain cost basis — as evidence the market may be approaching a bottom. Bitcoin traded at $63,935 at the time of writing, above its realized price of $52,900. Ether traded at $1,858, below its realized price of about $2,450. “Rising whale balances into price weakness is the clearest smart-money tell,” CryptoQuant said, adding that the pattern has historically preceded market bottoms while cautioning that the market remains exposed to further downside.

Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi estimated that roughly “$2 of AI hardening” could have prevented the Coldcard exploit, citing social media reports that some AI models rediscovered the vulnerability in less than 20 minutes.