Investors are throwing cash at spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds following the massive Coldcard hack.
Major U.S. funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, Grayscale, Morgan Stanley and others have received a total of $626 million in fresh cash following news of the hack on Friday, according to data from Farside Investors.
Hackers last week started millions in Bitcoin from Coldcard wallets after discovering a vulnerability in the product’s software. Some estimates put the amount of Bitcoin lost now at over $130 million.
Writing on X Thursday, Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior ETF analyst, Eric Balchunas, said the flows might not be related to the hack, but investors would be making a good move to allow fund managers to look after their Bitcoin.
“Who are you gonna trust to not screw up the security of your Bitcoin (or get it back if some scumbag does mess with it): a 5-man boutique in Canada or this guy and his 25,000-employee, $15T by-the-book empire?” wrote Balchunas, posting a picture of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s face, and criticizing Coldcard’s parent company Coinkite’s small team.
He added: “TradFi doesn’t seem so lame now after all does it?”
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) has received most of the new investment from the ETF investors.
The Wall Street titan’s ETF was approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024 and had the most successful launch in the history of ETFs.
Investors previously put off from buying Bitcoin due to the complexities of cold storage and private keys can now buy shares that trade on stock exchanges that track the price of Bitcoin.
The ETFs — managed by other top Wall Street fund managers — currently manage a total of $77.8 billion in assets, according to Coinglass data.
A firmware flaw in the popular Coldcard hardware wallets — tracing back to a 2021 build issue that skipped the device’s dedicated randomness chip — let an attacker guess weak private keys.
Millions of dollars in Bitcoin has been drained on a daily basis since the attack, and cautious investors have been moving their coins to other storage solutions — including exchanges.