Bitcoin slides to $63K as a $70M Coldcard exploit deepens self-custody fears

The dominant story today was the Coldcard cold-wallet exploit, which Galaxy Research now estimates has caused $70 million in Bitcoin losses. What makes this incident unusual — and unsettling — is that the vulnerability drained funds without requiring physical access to the devices, undermining the core security promise of hardware wallets. That news landed on a market already sitting at a Fear & Greed reading of 27, well into fear territory, and it was enough to push Bitcoin down 1.8% to $63,042. Ethereum fell a nearly identical 1.7%, and most of the top 15 tracked assets closed lower. Hyperliquid was the notable exception on the downside, dropping 6.4% with no single catalyst from the researcher's data — the move appears to reflect broader risk-off pressure hitting higher-beta assets harder. On the other end, MemeCore jumped 10.3%, which looks like speculative rotation: when sentiment is fearful and blue chips are sliding, low-cap meme tokens sometimes attract short-term traders looking for asymmetric moves. It is not a sign of broad market health. Uniswap's 8.5% reversal tells a clean story: yesterday's rally on Clarity Act optimism was real, but it was also fast and fully priced in within 24 hours. The launch of Uniswap's new 'Earn' yield product with Morpho — which under different conditions might have sustained momentum — could not offset profit-taking into a weakening tape.

• –Circle obtained a New York Department of Financial Services trust charter, adding a state-level regulatory layer to USDC's existing federal oversight and strengthening its standing with institutional users.
• –Tether reported $1.5 billion in Q2 operating profit but saw its reserve buffer — the cushion backing USDT above its liabilities — shrink by more than $4 billion, raising questions about the margin of safety behind the world's largest stablecoin.
• –The XRP Ledger re-enabled features that had been disabled after critical bugs were discovered, following a protocol upgrade that addressed the underlying issues — a technical milestone for the network.