Timeline of #Coldcard Heist. 2010 Peter D. Gray and Rodolfo Novak (NVK) begin working together at Ripe Apps, an iPhone/iPad app development studio in Toronto. Predates their Bitcoin involvement by a year. 2011 Gray discovers the Bitcoin whitepaper and shares it with Novak, his existing business partner. 2012 The pair builds btclook.com, a visual blockchain explorer, as a Ripe Apps side project. Later that year they build PCI-certified Bitcoin payment terminals and begin international deployment, ahead of incorporating. 2012–2013 Peter D. Gray and Rodolfo Novak (NVK) co-found Coinkite in Toronto. Gray becomes CTO, Novak becomes CEO. Debuts a working terminal at the Bitcoin Conference. Raises a $120K seed round, the company’s only funding round to date. Remains a team of around five. November 7, 2013 Peter D. Gray creates his GPG key (uid “Peter D. Gray [email protected]”). This key later signs dozens of commits under the switck identity, including the critical libngu changes. Early 2016 Coinkite shuts down its web wallet/exchange service, citing legal complications and DDoS attacks, and pivots fully to hardware — the turn that leads to Opendime and eventually Coldcard. December 2017 Coinkite announces the Coldcard hardware wallet. Pre-orders open for 2018 shipping. July 25, 2018 First Coldcard Mk1 units ship. August 2019 Peter creates the anonymous identity “switch,” named after the Matrix character Switch, using a still of that character as the profile picture. First posts note DEF CON is a good time to start a new identity. Later commits under this name are often single-word or extremely terse. 2019–2020 onward Bitcoin educators and influencers, including BTC Sessions, begin promoting Coldcard as one of the most secure Bitcoin hardware wallets. July 2020 Foundation Devices announces the Passport, built in part on Coldcard’s then-GPLv3 firmware. Early 2020s Ten31 becomes Coinkite’s sole external investor, confirmed on record by NVK in podcast disclosures. January 8, 2021 Coldcard firmware 3.2.1 announces the license change from GPL to MIT + Commons Clause. January 5, 2021 Domain switck.com is registered via a privacy service. The switck account posts the single word “got” the same day. January 28, 2021 Under switck, the vulnerable preprocessor guard (#ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG) is committed to libngu. This fails to force the hardware TRNG when the macro is set to zero. The library is co-maintained with scgbckbone. March 1, 2021 Under doc-hex, the commit “First pass w/ libNgU” (b18723dd) replaces remaining Trezor-derived GPL crypto and BIP-39 code with libngu. Seed generation switches from hardware path to ngu.random.bytes(). This is the point real hardware entropy is replaced by the weak software PRNG. Coinkite release notes later thank @switck for the library. March 17, 2021 Firmware v4.0.0 released, stating all crypto and BIP39 code had been replaced and the last remaining GPL code removed. March 29, 2021 Firmware 4.0.1 ships. Seeds generated under this and later affected versions fall back to the software PRNG, yielding roughly 40 bits of effective entropy on Mk2/Mk3 (roughly 72 bits on later models with limited secure-element mixing). Around April 2021 Public users begin questioning the libngu rewrite and the replacement of the prior crypto stack. 2022 As DocHex, Gray publicly states that as CTO he encourages Coinkite developers to operate under nyms and stay low-profile about their employer, and notes he may appear to author his own GitHub commits under a different identity. In a podcast appearance the same year, Novak refers to Gray directly as “Doc Hex, my co-founder.” May 2025 James O’Beirne audits the firmware, identifies the low-star, pseudonymously maintained libngu library as the RNG source. In his own words, posted on X: he wanted to figure out conclusively where the Coldcard RNG was sourced from, and traced it to a shady library. He contacts Coinkite. Reported response: if something were wrong, they’d likely already know about it by now. The warning is not acted on. July 30, 2026 Attackers begin draining wallets. Initial wave: roughly 594 BTC (~$38M) from about 500 addresses in ~25 minutes. Coinkite publishes a security advisory the same day acknowledging the 2021 entropy failure. July 31, 2026 Coinkite releases fixed firmware (4.2.0 Mk3, 5.6.0 Mk4/Mk5, 1.5.0Q). Existing weak seeds remain compromised and must be migrated. Independent verification beyond Coinkite’s own account: Bitcoin Core developer instagibbs reproduces the vulnerability on a fresh Mk3 device. Kevin Loaec of Wizardsardine is among the first to publicly sound the alarm. Peter Todd flags a specific multisig risk for 2-of-3 setups using compromised Coldcards. Multiple reports note NVK deleting older tweets related to the 2020–2021 license change and open-source decisions. ---- Authors: - Contra [npub14hq5lgadtyy9dhvtszq46dnl0s0xwdddqr7e32rdqqhma8a4xhsspxjjzu] - Laser [npub1vjk0gp2l4qnte2uy2l3ya78m5ays4wc7wmd6k64gw5498g8tf49qtkd33q]

After nearly a decade in Bitcoin, I can conclude that the average person has no interest in rolling dice, buying multiple hardware wallets, and setting up a maximum-paranoia multisig vault just to avoid losing Bitcoin. There is nothing wrong with doing that. It simply does not mean every person and institution will choose to do it. Normal people and institutions want something with lower volatility than Bitcoin that pays a high yield. That is why $STRC and $SATA have raised more than $10 billion during a Bitcoin bear market. This is an inflection point for Bitcoin because it reflects a realistic approach to providing the solution that normal people and institutions actually want.