Coverage spread: 2 sources — 2 center
Lean ratings via AllSides / Media Bias-Fact-Check. How this works.
Where they agree
- Both stories confirm Bitcoin’s price has been weak in 2026, well below its October all-time high of $126,080.
- Both note the pressures facing major players in the Bitcoin ecosystem, whether security vulnerabilities or falling asset value.
- Both draw on primary data sources — blockchain analytics (Galaxy Research, TRM Labs, Block) for the hack, and an SEC filing for Strategy’s trades.
Where they differ
- Fortune focuses on the Coldcard hack’s technical cause and scale, detailing the 2021 software flaw and over $116 million in stolen funds across 5,200+ addresses.
- Forbes centers on Strategy’s corporate finances, detailing Michael Saylor’s $104.7 million bitcoin sale and the company’s plan to potentially offload $5 billion more.
- Fortune contextualizes the hack within a record half-year of 207 crypto hacking incidents tracked by TRM Labs; Forbes situates its story within Strategy’s stock performance, down over 40% in 2026.
- Neither outlet links the two events, leaving the relationship between the security breach and Strategy’s cash-raising strategy unexplored.
What happened with the Coldcard hack
Since Thursday, owners of Coldcard hardware wallets have been hit by four separate waves of theft, according to Fortune’s reporting on blockchain intelligence firm Galaxy Research. More than 5,200 individual wallet addresses have been affected, and attackers have already moved roughly 1,816 Bitcoin — worth close to $116 million — out of those wallets. In one especially fast strike on July 30, Galaxy Research found that 1,196 addresses were emptied in just 41 minutes, draining a little over 1,083 Bitcoin (about $70.2 million) in that single episode.
Coldcard is made by Canadian firm Coinkite and is marketed as “cold storage” — a small offline device meant to be one of the most secure ways to hold Bitcoin long-term, since the keys never touch the internet. The vulnerability traces back to a 2021 software update that changed how the device generated recovery phrases, the strings of random words used to regenerate a wallet’s private keys. According to a report from the Bitcoin engineering and security teams at Block, the update caused Coldcard devices to stop using strong, unpredictable randomness and instead follow a predictable pattern. Once attackers figured out that pattern, they could replicate it on their own computers, systematically guess plausible recovery phrases, and identify which ones opened real wallets — all without ever physically accessing the device itself.
Coinkite has told users who generated a wallet seed on Coldcard to move their funds immediately, and issued an open letter to affected customers calling recent days some of the hardest in the company’s history. As of the reporting, no one has been definitively linked to the attack, though large-scale crypto thefts have often in the past been traced to state-backed hacking groups from North Korea or Russia.
How this fits into a rough year for crypto security
Fortune places the Coldcard breach within a broader wave of crypto hacks in 2026. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs recorded 207 separate hacking incidents in the past six months — the most ever tallied in any half-year period. Even so, total losses over that stretch, about $972 million, came in at less than half the $2.3 billion stolen in the first half of 2025. Despite the unease the Coldcard news generated among crypto commentators and executives on social media, Bitcoin and Ethereum prices barely moved, each dropping less than 1% since Thursday.
Strategy’s bitcoin sale and falling prices
Separately, Forbes reports that Michael Saylor’s company Strategy sold 1,638 bitcoin last week for $104.7 million, at an average price of $63,957 per coin, according to a Monday SEC filing. The sale came days after the company said it was weighing a plan to sell roughly $5 billion in bitcoin to build up cash and fund stock buybacks. Strategy also raised $290.6 million by selling about 3 million shares of its common stock. The firm still holds 842,138 bitcoin, bought at an average cost of $75,419 each — well above Monday’s price of just under $63,000. Strategy’s cash reserves have grown to $4 billion, up from $3.2 billion the prior month. Its stock ticked up slightly to $93.94 a share on Monday but remains down more than 40% for the year. Forbes notes Strategy made a similar $101.3 million bitcoin purchase back in June at an average price of $65,332, and that bitcoin’s all-time high of $126,080 came last October, since which the price has dropped substantially.
How the two stories connect and differ in coverage
Fortune’s article centers entirely on the Coldcard hack — the mechanics of the flaw, the scale of losses, and how it fits into the year’s broader hacking trend — while barely touching Bitcoin’s price beyond noting its stability after the breach. Forbes, by contrast, focuses squarely on Strategy’s financial maneuvering, treating the falling bitcoin price as the backdrop for Saylor’s decision to sell holdings and raise cash rather than as a security story. Neither outlet directly connects the hack to Strategy’s sale, leaving it to the reader to note that both stories point to a difficult stretch for the world’s largest cryptocurrency: one from an internal security failure, the other from sustained price weakness.
Sources
Featured photo: Grayliptrot via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)