The recent Coldcard wallet exploit, which drained bitcoin directly from investors’ self-managed wallets, could end up steering demand toward spot crypto exchange-traded funds and lifting some crypto-linked stocks, according to Wall Street analysts.
The view comes from Cantor Fitzgerald, a New York-based investment bank and financial services firm founded in 1945
In a note to clients, the bank said the breach may strengthen the case for publicly traded crypto companies tied to institutional adoption, as shaken self-custody users look for safer places to hold their coins. Why a hack could help custodians Self-custody means holding your own crypto directly, controlling the private keys yourself rather than trusting a company to hold them. The Coldcard exploit undercut confidence in that approach by showing that even offline “cold” wallets can be compromised if their underlying software is flawed.
Cantor said that loss of confidence could nudge Coldcard users toward managed custody providers, companies that hold crypto on a customer’s behalf. The bank named Robinhood Markets, Coinbase Global, BitGo Holdings, Bullish, eToro Group, and Gemini Space Station as firms that could see increased customer inflows as a result. Most Popular on TheStreet Roundtable: “The read-through is second-order but we would expect that token flows to custodians and exchanges will increase following the hack,” Nico Pasquariello, a digital asset specialist at the bank, wrote in the Wednesday note.