Coldcard Breach Drives 210,000 BTC Out of Long-Term Holder Wallets

On-chain data from Glassnode shows that roughly 210,000 bitcoin have left long-term holder wallets over the past week, the steepest single-week decline in that cohort since December 2024. Long-term holder supply has dropped from just under 15 million BTC to approximately 14.7 million BTC, a level that had been close to an all-time high before the Coldcard security incident.

The movement is unusual in context: prior waves of comparable magnitude coincided with market peaks in March 2021, March 2024, and December 2024, when experienced holders were taking profits into rising demand. This time bitcoin is trading around $64,000, roughly 50% below its October all-time high, which points away from profit-taking and toward custody migration as the dominant driver. The Coldcard breach, which stemmed from weak randomness in affected firmware allowing attackers to reconstruct wallet recovery phrases, affected thousands of addresses and generated estimated losses of as much as $114 million. Coldcard advised users that updating firmware alone could not secure keys already potentially compromised, and urged migration to freshly generated wallets.

Some of the on-chain movement therefore appears to reflect holders shifting into new self-custody arrangements, while others may be routing funds toward regulated custodians or spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds. US spot bitcoin ETFs attracted approximately $754 million in the same week, with BlackRock‘s iShares Bitcoin Trust accounting for most of those inflows. The critical analytical point is that on-chain movement does not automatically equal selling; in this instance the data is more consistent with a structural reassessment of custody than with a loss of conviction in bitcoin itself.