What people are missing with the Cold Card hack (my thoughts)

Everyone on here has obviously heard about the Cold Card hack, where the seed generation with their wallets being incredibly weak and predictable. I've also been seeing some things that suggest the company was aware of this "bug" years ago but yet did nothing about it. It's also interesting to me that it was so heavily shilled/marketed here on reddit.

With this out of the way, here's what I'm seeing with this event.

From what I've seen with a recent update, there were almost 5k wallets drained with a total value over $100m. These people otherwise did everything right but because of this garbage wallet that they used they had their funds essentially vanish. There were even some with short passphrases utilizing a couple words that also were victims of this as well, so people that would have taken some extra steps to try to protect themselves. While this is incredibly unfortunate for these individuals, the panic/freakout over self custody I'm seeing right now is severely overblown.

People are starting to question whether single sig wallets are sufficient and if they should use a passphrase, multi sig, etc. I also can see this event being taken by the media and tradfi institutions and used as a tactic to scare people from utilizing self custody and instead moving to ETFs and other BTC/crypto products. I understand the fear and uncertainty, but there's something that many on here seem to be missing.

As mentioned, this Cold Card hack drained approximately 5,000 wallets. Meanwhile, there are over 22 million BTC addresses with $100+ and 10.4 million with $1,000+. You had this garbage wallet that drained a number of addresses that is MINISCULE compared to the total number of addresses with $100+ worth of BTC in self custody. 1% of 22 million wallet with $100+ in BTC is 220k addresses, so this hack represents approximately 0.02% of these addresses, 1 out of 5000.

Instead of buying from one of the top companies that have sold millions of units (Ledger, Trezor, Tangem, etc.) these people bought some basically no name wallet that ended up having major flaws related to security. A Cold Card was also $250+ from what I saw, when you could have bought a basic Ledger or Trezor model for around $60 or so. The company according to the page I linked below also has a whooping 5 employees as of June of this year lol, to put this into perspective Ledger has over 800 and Trezor with over 200.

Coinkite - 2026 Company Profile, Team, Funding & Competitors - Tracxn

You are more likely to lose your crypto wealth/assets through user error when setting up and/or losing your seeds. If you are concerned about security, consider adding a strong passphrase to your primary seeds.

IF something like this had happened to one of the big cold wallet companies though, the ramifications for the broader crypto space would be enormous. With this said, I do NOT think that the general public will be utilizing self custody as we get into the 2030s and beyond, they'll primarily be boarded onto the crypto train through tradfi institutions.