COLDCARD wallet RNG flaw likely linked to $88 million Bitcoin theft

A critical integration error in COLDCARD hardware wallet firmware caused the device to silently fall back to a deterministic software-based random number generator (RNG) instead of the intended hardware RNG, fundamentally breaking the cryptographic security of wallet seed generation. Because the seeds were no longer truly random, attackers could reconstruct them offline by iterating through predictable values — enabling mass theft across thousands of wallets without ever physically accessing the devices. This incident highlights how a single low-level implementation bug in cryptographic infrastructure can have catastrophic, irreversible financial consequences. Hardware wallet users, who often place implicit trust in the device's secure element, had no practical way to detect the flaw themselves. The irreversibility of blockchain transactions means that once funds were stolen, recovery was impossible, making prevention and rapid disclosure the only viable defenses.