Joe Burnett, Vice President of Bitcoin Strategy at Strive, described the past week as "possibly one of the worst weeks in the history of Bitcoin" (source), urging large holders to consider institutional custodians over hardware wallets following a significant firmware exploit.

A vulnerability in Coldcard hardware wallets enabled the theft of approximately 1,082 BTC, valued at roughly $70 million. The exploit targeted weak seed randomness in firmware version 4.0.0. Coinkite, the manufacturer behind Coldcard, shipped the affected version from a code commit dated March 1, 2021, and later patched the flaw in version 4.21. Coldcard devices are widely favored among security-focused Bitcoin users for their air-gapped design, which allows signing transactions without a direct internet or computer connection — making the exploit particularly unsettling for a community that has long treated hardware wallets as the gold standard for self-custody.

Burnett emphasized that the affected users were not negligent. According to his account, victims had purchased genuine Coldcard devices, generated their seed phrases offline, and adhered to recommended security procedures — yet still lost their funds. He argued that a self-custody arrangement with a single point of failure is structurally insufficient and can fail in multiple ways. The incident underscores a risk that is difficult for individual holders to detect: firmware-level weaknesses in seed generation can silently compromise wallets from the moment they are initialized, sometimes years before any funds are moved.

Drawing a distinction between self-custody risks and institutional custodial practices, Burnett pointed to firms such as Fidelity and BitGo as operating under fundamentally different standards than the exchanges that dominated the pre-COVID landscape. He stated that institutional custodians actively work to avoid the same vulnerabilities inherent in individual hardware wallet setups. These custodians typically employ multi-signature architectures, geographically distributed cold storage, and are subject to regulatory oversight — a contrast to the exchange failures of the early Bitcoin era, when the collapse of platforms like Mt. Gox and, later, Cryptopia demonstrated the risks of concentrating funds under opaque operators.

Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder of Binance, also addressed the incident, urging holders to distribute their assets across multiple wallets and noting that "nothing is 100%."

While Bitcoin's price remained relatively stable — hovering around $63,000 through the weekend — market sentiment deteriorated sharply. Santiment recorded the most negative Bitcoin social sentiment ever documented, a reaction attributable to growing unease over the reliability of self-managed cryptographic keys.

Strive trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker ASST, with Matt Cole serving as CEO. As of late July, the company ranked as the seventh-largest public company holder of Bitcoin, holding 20,000 BTC valued at approximately $1.3 billion (Bitcoin Treasuries).

Burnett, a prominent Bitcoin advocate, has projected that the cryptocurrency could reach $11 million per coin by the first quarter of 2036. His thesis centers on the premise that AI-driven deflation will compel central banks to persistently expand the money supply, ultimately driving Bitcoin to such valuations.