Bitcoin hovered near $63,000 as August’s first full trading week began, with an alleged Coldcard hardware wallet vulnerability adding a crypto-specific security concern to a market already watching U.S.–Japan currency intervention, employment data and a sharp pullback in oil and technology shares.
The Coldcard incident had entered its fourth day by Sunday, with losses approaching $90 million in bitcoin, according to Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy. Thorn urged affected users to move funds promptly and use high transaction fees, suggesting the vulnerability remained an active operational threat rather than a one-off theft.
Bitcoin finished July 7.4% higher, but its ability to maintain that recovery faced a test near the 50-month exponential moving average, which stood at $65,827 at the start of August. The level has become a closely watched longer-term resistance point after BTC repeatedly struggled to establish a sustained move above it.
Coldcard losses put wallet security back in focus
The reported exploit was described as a low-entropy bug, meaning a weakness in the generation or handling of randomness that can make wallet security easier to compromise. Hardware wallets are designed to keep private keys offline, but a flaw affecting the creation or protection of those keys can expose funds before a user ever signs a transaction.
Thorn’s recommendation to use elevated transaction fees reflected the practical risk for users attempting to move bitcoin from affected wallets: a higher fee can help a transaction reach the blockchain faster when users are competing to transfer funds before an attacker does.
The scale of the thefts made the episode more consequential than a routine wallet-support issue. A loss near $90 million would place immediate pressure on wallet users to review their device setup, seed phrase generation and backup procedures, even where they have not identified unauthorized transfers.
The available on-chain data did not establish that stolen coins were being sent to exchanges or sold. Large inflows can come from many sources, including custodial rebalancing, internal wallet movements and trading transfers. Yet the timing of elevated deposits alongside a widely discussed hardware-wallet exploit gave the market an additional reason to watch exchange flows closely.
CryptoQuant recorded 34,932 BTC in exchange inflows on Friday and 8,768 BTC on Sunday. Inbound bitcoin deposit transactions reached 31,217 on Friday before easing to 19,537 on Sunday, according to the blockchain analytics platform.
Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, said the Friday increase was driven largely by transfers of between 1 BTC and 10 BTC. Those transactions reached roughly 7,300, their highest daily total since early February, Moreno said. That pattern points toward activity from smaller holders or entities using multiple modest-sized transfers, though blockchain data cannot by itself identify the owners’ motives.
A separate CryptoQuant measure, the 30-day long-term holder accumulation and distribution indicator, showed about 220,400 BTC of long-term holder supply inflow. The indicator tracks changes in the supply held by wallets categorized as long-term holders, offering a broader view of whether older coins are moving after extended periods of inactivity.
Dollar-yen intervention adds a macro risk signal
Crypto markets were also reacting to developments in foreign-exchange markets after the United States acted to support the Japanese yen when USD/JPY approached 164, according to TradingView data cited in the market update.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the operation used the Federal Reserve’s Foreign and International Monetary Authorities repo facility, known as FIMA. The facility allows approved foreign monetary authorities to temporarily exchange U.S. Treasury securities for dollars, reducing the need to sell Treasuries outright when dollar funding is needed.
Bessent also said U.S. officials were coordinating with Japan’s Ministry of Finance and central bank, remained prepared for further joint action and encouraged an expansion of FIMA in the coming months. The comments placed currency-market stability alongside the broader question of global dollar liquidity, which can affect appetite for volatile assets including bitcoin.
Currency intervention does not create a simple one-directional signal for crypto prices. A stronger yen can force the unwinding of trades funded with low-cost Japanese borrowing, a process that has periodically affected global risk assets. At the same time, official measures to ease dollar funding strains can limit the pressure that would come from a disorderly currency move.
Jobs report could reset rate expectations
U.S. labor data became the next major scheduled catalyst, with the July nonfarm payrolls report due Thursday. The prior report showed June payrolls increasing by 57,000, below the 114,000 consensus expectation, while payroll figures for the preceding two months were revised lower by a combined 74,000.
Continuum Economics forecast a July gain of 120,000 nonfarm payrolls, including 110,000 private-sector jobs. The firm expected the unemployment rate to rise to 4.3% from 4.2% and average hourly earnings to increase 0.3%.
The report could affect expectations for Federal Reserve policy through the rest of the year. A labor market that weakens more rapidly than forecast may increase pressure for lower interest rates, while a stronger figure could delay that repricing and keep financial conditions tighter for longer.
Equity markets entered the release after a difficult July. The S&P 500 fell 0.8% during the month and the Nasdaq Composite lost 3.2%, its weakest July since 2006, according to Mosaic Asset Company. The firm also cited the August-to-October period ahead of U.S. midterm elections as a seasonal headwind for equities.
In Asian markets, a semiconductor-led decline was followed by a rebound after earnings disappointments and debt concerns were associated with a $620 billion loss in market value over two days. Capital-expenditure guidance from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta was tracking toward a combined $730 billion for 2026, intensifying scrutiny of whether spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure can produce commensurate returns.
Oil added another volatile cross-market move. WTI and Brent crude both fell more than 8% on Monday after President Donald Trump said he had agreed to cancel an attack, conditional on an agreement involving the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program.
$65,827 remains the technical barrier
Bitcoin’s July advance left traders focused on the $65,827 50-month EMA, a long-term trend measure that smooths price changes over roughly four years. Rekt Capital said repeated rejection from that level could align with continued downside pressure over time.
CoinGlass derivatives data identified $64,200 as an area where a move higher could trigger forced liquidations. Such liquidations occur when leveraged positions no longer meet margin requirements, often accelerating short-term price moves once a closely watched level breaks.
David Eng, a quantitative analyst, described the area around $63,000 as near bitcoin’s long-term statistical floor under a power-law model framework. Models of that kind map historical price ranges rather than predict a fixed outcome, and they offer little protection against abrupt moves driven by security failures, macroeconomic surprises or a change in leveraged positioning.
For now, the market faces a tightly packed set of risks: an active wallet-security incident, a major U.S. employment report, currency intervention and a resistance level just above the current bitcoin price. Whether BTC can reclaim the mid-$64,000 range will likely depend as much on the response to those immediate pressures as on July’s 7.4% gain.
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