Bitcoin active addresses surge to 980K after Coldcard firmware exploit drains up to $100M

On July 31, 2026, Bitcoin’s active address count hit approximately 980,000, the highest reading since December 2024. Before you interpret that as a sign of a bull market waking up, here’s the thing: it wasn’t enthusiasm driving the surge. It was panic. The spike came one day after Coinkite, the manufacturer behind Coldcard hardware wallets, issued an emergency security advisory disclosing a critical vulnerability in its Mk3 devices. Thousands of Bitcoin holders rushed to move their funds off compromised wallets, producing a sharp jump in network activity that had nothing to do with market sentiment. What the exploit actually was The vulnerability traces back to a firmware update, version 4.0.1, released in March 2021. That update contained a flaw in the device’s random number generator, the component responsible for generating the entropy that makes a seed phrase cryptographically secure. Coinkite published its advisory on July 30, urging any user who generated seeds on the affected firmware to treat those seeds as compromised and migrate funds immediately. By July 31, the network was flooded with precautionary movement transactions. Active addresses went from roughly 645,000 on Ju...