COLDCARD RNG incident the public record, collected and explained
Informational only, and this site never asks for your seed words. details

Informational only. This is an open source collection of what others have published about the incident, together with an explanation of it. It is not financial, security or legal advice, and not a substitute for professional advice about your own situation. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for Coinkite. Material is attributed and quoted as published; where sources disagree their scenarios are kept separate with their assumptions rather than reconciled into one answer. Everything is meant to be checked against the linked evidence rather than taken on trust. Act on your own judgement about a particular situation. Editorial standards and corrections.

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Reproducible firmware and chain investigation

alvap-weak-rng-research

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alva-p/coldcard-weak-rng-research/main/README.md

Organisation
脕lvaro P.
Evidence role
Independent primary analysis
Published
2026-07-31
Source changes
0
Detected differences
0
Unreviewed
0
Copies held
1

Independent re-derivation of fix commits, on-chain movements and vulnerable versus patched firmware symbols. Its README excludes real-seed recovery and labels unfinished work explicitly; deeper repository files include public transaction identifiers and are not mirrored by this archive.

Every check is recorded, including checks that found no text change. A detected edit is therefore bounded between two checks. The publisher's exact save time is not observable from this record. Last checked .

  1. Earliest copy held Current
    seen · Captured here 3,273 chars
    Extracted text as captured 
    # coldcard-weak-rng-research
Independent, defensive investigation into the COLDCARD firmware entropy failure
disclosed 2026-07-30/31 and the ~594.5 BTC coordinated sweep observed the same day.
Everything here is verifiable: real commits, real blockchain data, real compiled
binaries.
**[馃搫 Read the report (English)](docs/en/report.md)** 路 **[馃搫 Le茅 el informe (Espa帽ol)](docs/es/report.md)**
## What this is
On July 30, 2026, roughly 594.5 BTC was drained from 500 Bitcoin addresses in about
fifteen minutes. The victims used COLDCARD hardware wallets, and the root cause was a
firmware bug that made supposedly random wallet secrets predictable. Coinkite (the
manufacturer) and Block published official advisories. This repository does not just
summarize those advisories, it independently re-derives the parts that can be
re-derived: the fix commits, the on-chain flow of the stolen funds, and the bug itself,
compiled and proven with real tooling.
## Three things you can check yourself
1. **The code.** [`evidence/commits/findings.md`](evidence/commits/findings.md) verifies
   the fix commits directly against the Coldcard firmware repository, including one the
   official advisory doesn't mention.
2. **The money.** [`evidence/onchain/`](evidence/onchain) traces the theft on-chain from
   scratch, starting only from the public consolidation address, not from any published
   transaction list. Result: 500 transactions, 1,324 UTXOs, ~594.5 BTC, matching public
   reporting. Every transaction ID is in
   [`drain-transactions.csv`](evidence/onchain/drain-transactions.csv).
3. **The build.** [`evidence/builds/`](evidence/builds) compiles the vulnerable and
   patched firmware from source and uses `arm-none-eabi-nm` on the real binaries to show
   which function the "random number" call actually resolved to, before and after the
   fix. See [`comparison.md`](evidence/builds/comparison.md).
## What's not here
No PoC that recovers a real seed, scans for vulnerable addresses, or moves funds that
aren't the researcher's own, and none ever will be. See [`DISCLAIMER.md`](DISCLAIMER.md).
A synthetic RNG simulator and a Bitcoin regtest demonstration are planned but not built
yet; open items are tracked honestly in [`RESEARCH_GAPS.md`](RESEARCH_GAPS.md), including
one significant one: the Mk3 fix version Coinkite announced (4.2.0) has no matching git
tag as of this writing.
## Sources
Every claim traces to a primary source (code, commit, or on-chain data) or a rated
secondary source. Full list with reliability ratings in
[`references/sources.yml`](references/sources.yml).
## How to cite this
```

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