Nearly a million Bitcoin addresses shifted coins on July 31. That's the most wallet activity since December 2024, when Bitcoin was rallying toward $100,000. This time it arrived with BTC trading around $60,000, and the reason was panic, not profit.
The Coldcard hardware wallet disaster triggered it. Attackers had discovered a flaw in the device's random number generator and started draining wallets in waves. Three confirmed attacks hit 4,585 addresses and stole 1,367 Bitcoin worth $88.6 million. A fourth wave grabbed another 380 Bitcoin. Users saw their savings disappear and reacted fast.
Glassnode data showed about 980,000 active addresses on July 31, a jump of more than 50% in a single day. But sending addresses drove almost all of that growth. Receiving addresses barely budged. That tells you what was happening on chain, thousands of wallets emptied toward a smaller set of destinations. People weren't buying or selling. They were moving coins to safety.
The size of transfers revealed who panicked hardest. Small holders, the ones with less than one Bitcoin, moved 39,600 BTC that day. The only time retail-sized wallets had shifted that much was November 16, 2022, when FTX collapsed. One Coldcard user lost 18.25 BTC, worth $1.6 million, in under seven minutes. Stories like that rippled through the community and pushed thousands to act.
CryptoQuant's Julio Moreno called it a healthy reflex. "The Bitcoin plebs had not move[d] this amount of BTC in a day since the FTX collapse. I like to see that people seem to be taking action." But there's a twist. In 2022, users pulled coins off exchanges and into cold storage. This time, they were abandoning cold storage itself after it failed them.
This article is informational and does not constitute investment advice. Always conduct your own research before making financial decisions.
