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Coldcard's $100M Drain, Institutional Moves & DeFi Under Fire | Aug 3
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Over $100M drained from Coldcard hardware wallets via a 2021 firmware flaw, while BlackRock, Mastercard, and Franklin Templeton made major infrastructure moves. Today's briefing covers the Coldcard exploit, a $1B+ Bitcoin transfer decoded, DeFi attacks, 100+ project shutdowns, and XRP whale divergence.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Sixteen thousand four hundred Bitcoin moved in a single transfer on August third. That's over one billion dollars shifting to a fresh wallet after seven months of sitting completely still.
The bigger and more damaging story from the past twenty-four hours is the Coldcard hardware wallet exploit, which has now been quantified at over one hundred million dollars. Approximately one thousand five hundred and ninety-six Bitcoin drained from seventy-three hundred addresses, all traced back to a firmware flaw in March twenty twenty-one that weakened the random number generator used in key generation.
This isn't an isolated event. The same forty-eight hours saw a smart contract exploit drain just over nine hundred thousand dollars from MOKE token's liquidity pools on BNB Chain via PancakeSwap manipulation, and a separate seven hundred thousand dollar attack on LpdFi.
The project shutdown count has now crossed one hundred for the first half of twenty twenty-six. The list includes names that were considered established: BitMEX, BitMart, AscendEX, Loopring, Leap Wallet.
Against that backdrop, the institutional layer kept moving. Mastercard acquired BVNK for stablecoin infrastructure.
One more data point worth tracking. On August third, fifty-five percent of XRP outflows from transfers over one million units came off Binance.
The two signals worth narrowing attention to going forward: whether the sixteen thousand four hundred Bitcoin from August third appear in exchange deposit addresses in the next two days, and whether the Coldcard fourth wave materializes and forces coins onto the market. Everything else is context.
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