A 12-Year Dormant Bitcoin “Ancient Whale” Makes an Emergency Move: Risk Avoidance or Being Hunted?
On August 4, 2026, late at night Beijing time, a strange ripple suddenly appeared beneath the surface of the crypto market. A Bitcoin address that had remained completely dormant since 2013 — 18TExP — suddenly became active. 500 BTC (worth approximately $31.3 million) were transferred the moment the transaction was confirmed on-chain. This wallet had been asleep for a staggering 12 years and 8 months, making it even older than the birth of Ethereum. 500 BTC Transferred from the 18TExP Address (Source: CoinDesk) Just as people began speculating whether this was the reappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto himself, another far more chilling backdrop emerged: Coldcard, known as the “fortress” of Bitcoin hardware wallets, had just been exposed with a critical security vulnerability, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of BTC being stolen. The discovery process of this vulnerability further demonstrated both the power and the threat of AI. After the Coldcard team released a security advisory in late July, someone submitted the source code to Claude Code, an AI coding model, for review. The AI identified the exact line of code responsible for the randomness failure in just eight minutes. The revival of an ancient Bitcoin whale and the fatal Coldcard wallet vulnerability happened