Decentral Block Post

Bitcoin (BTC) miners now own more BTC than at any time in history as the impact of the past months' turbulence wears off.

According to data from on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant, miners' BTC holdings increased dramatically in July.

Miners keep stacking sats

In the latest sign of miners recovering from recent price weakness, the amount of BTC in their wallets has hit a fresh all-time high.

As noted by CryptoQuant contributor and analyst Jan Wuestenfeld, their combined balance totaled 1,865,272 BTC as of July 29. The start of August saw a slight decline, with the total as of Aug. 3 being 1,864,842 BTC.

Between July 6, when reserves hit a local low, and the July 29 record, miners' wallet balance increased by 0.37%, or 6,885 BTC.

The exploit took place due to a smart contract vulnerability that saw hundreds of users other than the hacker also get involved, taking away as much as they can by simply copy-pasting the transaction data used by the initial hacker and changing the wallet address to theirs. The event was later deemed as a decentralized robbery by many due to the involvement of normal community members.

Later, the Nomad team revealed to Cointelegraph that some of the people who took funds were acting benevolently to protect the crypto from getting into the wrong hands.

In the aftermath of the hack, the crypto analysis group BestBrokers found that the first exploit took place on Aug. 1, which drained 400 Bitcoin (BTC) in four different transactions. The hackers later diverted all 22,880 Ether (ETH), then moved on to the over $107 million worth of stablecoins and finally started diverting the altcoins supported by the project.

The incident has seen WBTC, Wrapped Ether (WETH), USD Coin (USDC), Frax (FRAX), Covalent Query Token (CQT), Hummingbird Governance Token (HBOT), IAGON (IAG), Dai (DAI), GeroWallet (GERO), Card Starter (CARDS), Saddle DAO (SDL) and Charli3 (C3) tokens taken from the bridge.

Related: Ongoing Solana-based wallet hack seeing millions drained

With Solana (SOL) hitting the headlines for succumbing to a hack on Aug. 3, prominent crypto CEOs — including Binance’s Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, KuCoin’s Johnny Lyu and OKX’s Jay Hao — recommended SOL investors move their holdings over to their own exchanges as an immediate security measure.

Numerous blockchain investigators and crypto investors flagged an alleged widespread private key compromise, allowing the attacker to steal native SOL tokens and Solana-compatible SPL tokens such as USD Coin (USDC) from Phantom and Slope wallets. However, the root cause of the attack remains a mystery as all parties, including Solana and Phantom, denied faults at their ends. Phantom’s official stance on the matter shared with Cointelegraph was:

“We are working closely with other teams to get to the bottom of a reported vulnerability in the Solana ecosystem. At this time, the team does not believe this is a Phantom-specific issue.”

Parallel to the ongoing investigations of the Solana fiasco, CZ warned investors of “an active security incident on Solana” that drained funds in SOL and USDC off over 7000 wallets. His recommendation to unhacked investors was to transfer their assets to a cold wallet or Binance.

Lyu gave a similar assurance to KuCoin users as he confirmed that all SOL assets were not impacted by the hack; as he said: