Coldcard Issues Enhanced Firmware Update Amid Ongoing Bitcoin (BTC) Theft Fallout

Coinkite, the Canadian firm behind the Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallet, has rolled out a significant firmware upgrade in the wake of a major security incident that saw substantial amounts of Bitcoin drained from affected devices.

The company is urging owners to act promptly, highlighting that the underlying exploit linked to compromised wallets continues to pose risks.

The update, version 5.6.1 for Mk4 and Mk5 models and 1.5.1Q for the Q series, arrives after an intensive three-week examination of the entire system following an emergency patch in late July.

That earlier flaw stemmed from a long-standing issue in how certain devices generated wallet seeds, reducing the effective randomness far below intended levels and allowing attackers to reconstruct private keys offline without physical access to the hardware.

Losses from the resulting thefts have been estimated by independent trackers in the range of well over $100 million in Bitcoin across thousands of addresses.

According to Coinkite, the comprehensive review process incorporated assistance from advanced AI systems, including the Kimi model and other leading frontier models.

These tools helped scrutinize not only the original randomness-generation pathway but the broader codebase and related functions.