Coldcard's bad firmware flash triggers the great bitcoin reshuffle 🔐

Roughly 210,000 BTC have left long-term holder wallets over the past week, the steepest decline in that cohort since December 2024, according to Glassnode data. Long-term holder supply, which Glassnode defines as coins dormant for around 155 days, has fallen from just under 15 million BTC to approximately 14.7 million BTC. The movement comes as $BTC trades near $64,000, roughly 50% below its October all-time high, a setting that contrasts with past waves of long-term holder distribution that clustered near market peaks in March 2021, March 2024 and December 2024.

On-chain analysts have tied the shift to the Coldcard security incident, in which weak randomness in affected firmware allowed attackers to reconstruct some users' wallet recovery phrases and drain funds. Thousands of addresses were impacted, with estimated losses reaching as much as $114 million. Coldcard has urged affected users to generate new wallets and move their funds, noting that updating firmware alone cannot secure keys that may already be compromised.

The exodus therefore appears to reflect a migration in custody rather than conventional profit-taking. Some holders are transferring bitcoin into newly generated wallets, while others are moving assets to regulated custody services. $BTC did not make new lows in the days following the hack, and on-chain metrics around long-term holder behavior continue to track the Coldcard response rather than typical cycle dynamics, leaving the cohort's total holdings at roughly 14.7 million BTC as the reshuffle continues.