Satoshi's Ghost Stories: 12-Year-Old BTC Wallet Wakes Up, Moves $31M Mid-Coldcard Chaos 💤

A bitcoin wallet dormant since 2013 moved 500 BTC, worth $31.3 million, on Monday, becoming one of several long-inactive stashes to shift on-chain since the Coldcard hardware wallet hack began on July 30. On-chain tracker Whale Alert first flagged the transaction from wallet 18TExP, which had been inactive for 12.7 years, when the coins were last worth roughly $500,000. BTC was trading at $63,760.27 at the time of the move.

The reactivation came amid an unfolding security crisis around Coldcard, a Bitcoin-only hardware wallet, and analysts suggested the timing was not coincidental. "Wallet 18TExP, holding 500 BTC($31.27M), transferred all 500 BTC to a new wallet 1 hour ago after over 12 years of inactivity. The owner may have moved the funds to a new wallet due to security concerns following the Coldcard hack," blockchain sleuth Lookonchain said on X. According to researchers at Galaxy, attackers have exploited a Coldcard flaw dating back to March 2021 to drain thousands of BTC from Coldcard-generated wallets since July 30, with total damage estimated at about $130 million in BTC.

The 500 BTC transfer was not an isolated case. Data from CryptoQuant tracking spent output age bands, which group bitcoin moved on a given day by how long each coin had been dormant before being spent, showed a clear spike in old-coin movement in the same window. Coins dormant for 10 years or longer saw roughly 935 BTC move on Aug. 3, the largest single-day total since March 20. Coins dormant for five to seven years saw a larger spike, with roughly 6,388 BTC moving on July 31. Over the weekend, some analysts pointed to increased inflows of BTC onto exchanges as the hack dented confidence in self-custody safety.