COLDCARD RNG incident the public record, collected and explained
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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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Everything You Need to Know About the COLDCARD Hack

therage-coldcard-hack-guide

https://www.therage.co/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-coldcard-hack/

Organisation
The Rage
Evidence role
Reporting
Published
2026-08-03
Source changes
0
Detected differences
1
Unreviewed
0
Copies held
2

Long-form incident explainer tracing the disclosure from an earlier Reddit report through the mass sweeps, with guidance for potentially affected owners. Secondary reporting that is useful for its narrative synthesis; technical, historical and loss claims remain attributable to the article and the primary sources it cites.

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 .

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Bitcoin
Everything You Need to Know About the COLDCARD Hack
How a dismissed reddit post turned out to be the start of the largest self-custody theft in Bitcoin's history: How it happened, and what you can do if you're affected.
by
L0la L33tz
Updated
August 03, 2026
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If you are an affected user, do not dispose of your COLDCARD device. The UID that generated the seed might be used to help identify you as a rightful owner if funds are recovered. If you use COLDCARDs as the majority of devices in your multi-signature setup, only move funds via private mempool services such as Slipstream to avoid your transactions being sniped. For more information, jump to the "You're Affected – What Now?" and "Chances of Recovery" sections of this article.
On July 30th, a Reddit user posted in panic to the message board that one of their wallets – left untouched since 2021 – had been drained for roughly 0.8 BTC. "I haven’t done anything since creation except sending into the wallet," the user wrote.
"I'm hearing a potential issue with some Coldcard wallets being drained," Kevin Loaec of the Bitcoin security firm Wizard Sardine posted on X. "I will not FUD, but would like to get at least reports of trusted people." Throughout the day, more and more reports of affected users started rolling in.
"There is no need to panic, someone loaded a bad seed into a COLDCARD and/or leaked their seed," Rodolfo Novak, founder of COLDCARD manufacturer Coinkite, posted on X. The post has since been deleted. "That post is wrong," Novak, better known as NVK, explained. Since Thursday, over 1,000 BTC worth more than $100 Million Dollars have been drained from COLDCARD devices.
Researchers at Block, part of Jack Dorsey's Square, were quick to identify the issue. While implementing a new Random Number Generator (RNG) in 2021, COLDCARD engineers disabled the very feature that was meant to retain randomness from the device's hardware, causing random number generation to fall back to the software library – resulting in not creating enough entropy to be secure.
Anyone with some compute is now able to recreate a COLDCARD wallet's seed. In total, four waves of suspected drainages have been identified over the past four days.
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The RageL0la L33tz
You're Affected – What Now?

    Excerpt only. The complete copy is held offline and backs quotations on this site. The original publication remains the canonical public source.

1 presentation-noise difference. Sidebar, ticker and other page chrome churn that our review classified as not being a change to what the source says.
  • +5 -6 Rotating sidebar chrome: the "Latest posts" list on the article page gained a new Rage post ("Is Debanking The New Immigration Policy?") and dropped an older one; the COLDCARD article itself is unchanged.
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