Bitcoin (BTC) daily active addresses jumped from 645,000 on July 30 to nearly 1 million on July 31. The reading was the highest since December 10, 2024, and the Coldcard panic, not new demand, drove it.
BTC traded at $60,347 at press time, up 1.24% in 24 hours, BeInCrypto data shows. Three on-chain charts reveal what holders actually did during a weekend of severe stress for self-custody.
Nearly 1 Million Addresses Moved, the Most Since December 2024
Glassnode data shows about 980,000 active addresses on July 31, up more than 50% in a single day. The jump came days after attackers began draining Coldcard hardware wallets through a flawed random number generator.
Three confirmed attack waves have been linked to 1,367 BTC, worth $88.6 million, stolen from 4,585 addresses. A suspected fourth wave has since swept over 380 BTC more.
The last time this many addresses moved, on December 10, 2024, bitcoin traded near $100,000 during a euphoric rally. This time, the same activity arrived with BTC around $60,000. Same metric, opposite emotion.
CryptoQuant Head of Research Julio Moreno noted on X that sending addresses drove nearly all of the growth. Receiving addresses barely moved in proportion, which suggests consolidation. Thousands of wallets emptied toward a much smaller set of destinations.
Historically, active addresses had churned between 550,000 and 750,000 for most of 2026. Therefore, the spike reads as a one-off event rather than a new trend.
Small Holders Moved the Most BTC Since the FTX Collapse
CryptoQuant’s Spent Output Value Bands point to who panicked. Transfers below 1 BTC totaled 39,600 BTC on July 31. The only comparable daily reading came on November 16, 2022, at 39,900 BTC, days after FTX failed.
These bands capture retail-sized wallets, exactly the profile of Coldcard’s user base. One holder lost 18.25 BTC, worth $1.6 million, in under seven minutes. Stories like his pushed thousands of users to act.
Moreno framed the migration as a healthy reflex rather than capitulation.
“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.”
He shared the observation on X on August 1.
However, the direction of travel has reversed since 2022. Back then, users pulled coins off exchanges and into cold storage. This time, a cold storage failure sent coins the other way. The reversal feeds the self-custody debate that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao reignited this week.
Many Wallets, Few Transactions. The Anatomy of the Coldcard Panic
The third chart completes the picture. Glassnode counted 761,796 transfers on July 31, a local spike but far from a record. Prior peaks on December 13, 2024, April 19, 2025, and May 9, 2026, all cleared 1 million transfers.
The divergence matters. Active addresses hit a 20-month high while transfer counts stayed inside their ordinary range. In other words, an enormous number of wallets moved, but each made only one or a few transactions.
That is the anatomy of a mass emergency sweep, not an activity boom. In contrast, earlier transfer records came from concentrated, high-frequency churn by far fewer entities.
Galaxy Research head Alex Thorn observed sweep transactions running at 13.8 per block, roughly 45 times the pre-incident baseline. The shock even reached protocol politics, as developers postponed the BIP-110 soft fork activation, citing the incident.
The Chain Recorded Fear, Not a Trend
Raw on-chain metrics will look distorted for days. Analysts may prefer entity-adjusted data until sweep activity fades, and active addresses could normalize just as sharply as they spiked.
Notably, the price barely reacted. Bitcoin held near $60,000 through its most active day in 20 months. That calm suggests the moved coins fled risk rather than sought exits.
The next signal to watch sits on the exchange books. If migrated coins stay put, the episode remains a security story. If they start selling, the Coldcard panic could yet become a market story.
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