According to data from Santiment, hackers exploited a legacy bug, draining a substantial amount of funds as loss estimates continue to climb. Rather than panic-selling their holdings onto exchanges, affected users opted to migrate their Bitcoin to secure locations onchain.
Without sell pressure
On July 31, the day immediately following the initial wave of drains, active Bitcoin addresses surged to 978,570. That represents roughly 1.6 times the average daily activity for July and sits 43% higher than the month's previous peak.
The elevated activity held firm: between August 1 and August 6, active addresses averaged around 720,000 daily, compared to July's baseline of 610,000.
Analytic models recorded a sharp contraction in market sentiment. Santiment's sentiment balance indicator plummeted to -540 on August 1, marking its lowest reading since February before staging a partial recovery.
However, the panic didn't translate into spot dumping. Average daily exchange inflows from August 1 to August 6 hovered at $1.55 billion, coming in lower than July's daily average of $1.67 billion.
"Holders were rotating assets to fresh private keys rather than sending them to order books," Santiment noted.
Summarizing the ecosystem's response, a crypto whale using the handle awpSOL5 pointed out that the community recited the classic "not your keys, not your coins" mantra before actually following through and moving their assets.
