Bitcoin and cryptocurrency traders continue to grapple with the aftermath of a significant $100 million bitcoin attack, which has ignited concerns regarding a potential decline in bitcoin prices. The bitcoin price has rebounded since the attack on hardware wallet Coldcard was first reported but remains near its recent lows, leaving traders nervously braced for a dramatic shock. Currently, Elon Musk has made a significant prediction, while bitcoin developers have employed AI tools to identify nearly 5,000 security vulnerabilities across approximately 400 projects within a mere 24-hour period. A volunteer group of bitcoin developers is conducting a coordinated security audit that has already revealed the situation to be “extremely bad,” uncovering approximately 5,000 security vulnerabilities across nearly 400 projects within a 24-hour period.
The findings include 85 critical and 635 high-severity bugs, most of which have already been verified by project owners. “We’ve grown to 16 globally distributed people working 24/7,” Calle, the pseudonymous developer behind the Cashu ecash protocol, posted to X. “We’re running a large-scale ecosystem security audit across bitcoin code bases.” The auditors are utilising Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model, an open-weight, China-based artificial intelligence tool, with Calle asserting an expenditure of $10,000 per day on compute, expressing gratitude to OpenSats for covering the costs.
“We have been working around the clock,” one of the auditors, chief executive of bitcoin insurance company AnchorWatch, Rob Hamilton, posted to X, adding his team has found some “critical issues.” Last week, the exploit of the Coldcard bitcoin hardware wallet resulted in the draining of nearly 2,000 bitcoin, valued at just over $100 million, from more than 5,200 addresses within a matter of days. This incident has ignited a discussion regarding the security of utilising technical, self-custody wallets.
The developers of the Coldcard wallet have urged users to relocate their funds, appealing to social media users to “help spread the word.” “Please treat this as urgent,” Coldcard’s X account posted. “Migrate your funds. Follow the advisory for your model, upgrade your device, generate a new seed, and carefully move your funds … The threat is still ongoing.” A wallet associated with a Coldcard hacker has seen multiple deposits since last week, with certain transactions including messages attached thru bitcoin’s OP_RETURN function. The wallet currently holds $36 million worth of bitcoin, the vast majority of which is believed to have been stolen.