Coldcard Hack Estimate Puts $116M Bitcoin Security Review in Focus

Coinkite CEO NVK defended Coldcard’s security process after an estimated $116 million Bitcoin theft attributed to a seed-generation flaw. In a November 9 post on X, he said a new artificial-intelligence model detected the defect that human reviewers had missed. His remarks shifted attention from the size of the reported loss toward the circumstances that allowed the vulnerability to survive earlier checks.

Security developer Luke Dashjr disputed NVK’s account of what human reviewers were capable of detecting, according to CoinEdition. The disagreement adds a technical dimension to the incident: NVK presents AI-assisted detection as the means of identifying a missed weakness, while Dashjr questions the description of the human review process. Neither the supplied summaries nor the reported posts provide a detailed account of the underlying flaw or its exploitation.

CoinEdition said Coldcard had undergone at least two paid third-party security reviews before the exploit, with one review focused on an area left unspecified in the available coverage. The company’s chief executive presented those reviews as part of the defense of Coldcard’s checks, but the reported debate concerns whether those checks could reasonably have found the defect in question. Crypto.news characterized NVK’s intervention as reigniting discussion of the incident rather than introducing a new loss estimate.

Crypto Economy supplied additional scale and timing for the reported compromise, estimating approximately $116 million in losses affecting more than 5,200 Bitcoin addresses between July and August 2026. That address count and timeframe appeared only in Crypto Economy’s coverage and were not independently included in the summaries from CoinEdition or Crypto.news. Across all three outlets, however, the $116 million estimate is consistent.

Market conditions were subdued as the security debate continued. Bitcoin was priced at $75,162, down 0.12% over 24 hours and 2.33% over seven days, with a market capitalization of $1.51 trillion. The broader crypto market was flat at a total capitalization of $2.57 trillion, while the Fear & Greed index stood at 32, indicating a Fear reading. The development places scrutiny on hardware-wallet assurance and the potential role of AI in security testing, with the precise validation of the flaw and the earlier reviews among the matters still being debated.