I know what many people will say, that I am just scared because one hardware wallet got ruined, ColdCard as the main example, but before you said this few people surrounding myself have already started to show this sign.
You're scared, and it's ok, that's a natural response to things like this. The question is, what will you do with that fear. Will you just conclude that this is an isolated issue and continue being lax in your financial security? You need to have a better opsec while using these wallets by including an extra layer of security.
It's what made me think this way, my friends are already complaining that hardware wallets aren't safe anymore, one fell and others are already looking like spoilt eggs.
Is there any evil agenda behind this or it's just normal human reaction?
Well, that's why they have a friend like you to ground them in reality and explain to them what really went down, and how the other option is not better either if they continue the same mistake of having a lax opsec and too much trust in the software promising you a "secured" wallet.
The detail that should focus every security team in this industry: the source code was viewable the entire time. Human reviewers looked at it for years. They confirmed the hardware RNG existed. Nobody checked whether the seed generator actually called it correctly. Researchers now believe the vulnerability was most likely found by a frontier AI model - someone pointed the best available model at the public source, and it surfaced what human eyes had missed.
Whether or not that attribution is ever confirmed, it doesn't matter. It is plausible today, and it will be normal tomorrow. The threat environment has changed, and we'd like to talk plainly about what Casa is doing.
In fact, Coldcard founder and team received reports and complaints from community about that, and human detected that security issue but the manufacturer ignored the risk.
Actually, that is not exactly what happened. On June 17th, an audit on coldcard RNG was published in GitHub, and they didn't include any high risk vulnerabilities in the RNG auditthey found 1 medium and several low risk bugs.
Coldcard Firmware Security Audit 2026-06-17
Scope: memory crashes OOB, weak RNG, nonce reuse, Bitcoin signing logic (oversized-fee, change/fee handling), integer/number overflows, and anything else that could cause loss of funds or device compromise.
Method: read-only review. Python layer (PSBT/signing/serialization, RNG, NFC, QR) plus a deep multi-agent pass over the C code (bootloader/USB dispatch, secure-element I2C, NFC/NDEF, QR/BBQr decode, crypto wrappers, flash/firmware-update). Every C finding was put through an independent adversarial verifier prompted to refute it; only what survived, plus manual re-tracing of the headline bug, is reported here.
Bottom line: This is a mature, well-defended codebase. None of the headline issues flagged by the initial automated sweep survived verification the signing path, RNG, and fee logic are sound. The audit found one genuine memory-safety bug (a stack overflow in the secure-element response parser, gated behind physical bus access) and a handful of defense-in-depth hardening gaps in the bootloader firmware-update path. No issue was found that lets a remote or USB/NFC/QR/SD attacker steal funds or crash the device into a fund-loss state.
sourceSo...even though it was audited, they couldn't find any high risk bug that would lead to the loss of users coins.
Personally, I feel open-source is a double-edged sword. Same way the public can review this code and source for bugs to be resolved, that's exactly the same way malicious actors can source for bugs to exploit. I know it is often advisable to use open source wallets for transparency and trust, but this also has its own down sides when it comes to security, especially if the wallet's security team is doing a poor job and not actively tackling potential security vulnerability.
Although, this coldcard case is good in the sense that:
- It created that awareness of taking extra steps towards securing our wallets, and not trust blindly because it's an open source cold wallet.
- It brought forth the awareness of the bug in the wallet, and others can learn from it.
- It has made different companies take proactive measures and deploy the use of AI to strengthen securitywhich is a good thing.
But, the cost of all these lessons is the loss of the numerous wallets being hackedwhich is indeed sad.
Most average people don't want self-custody, which is why most Bitcoin investors use a centralized mechanism like CoinBase or Robinhood.
A well-known and insured exchange is by far the safest way to keep your Bitcoin. These large companies are extremely secure, and they are insured if they get hacked, so you will never lose money no matter what.
Hmm, I would not say they are all extremely secure. We never know until they get hacked. Because they are considered extremely secure because by now, hackers can't find their way in, but one day they can. At least, they can get your information by breaching some servers and people in support teams directly through phishing emails. So you can't say all of these exchanges are extremely secure.
Instead, I would never say this to someone without giving them a disclaimer about how they can lose your money, like the FTX exchange. They did give the funds back, but at what cost? People got the USD value of the coins they held, and the conversion was based on the price at the time when it went down. So everyone made a huge loss. Many other exchanges cost people huge amounts of money. BitMart went down and then stopped withdrawals, so people were unable to withdraw their money.
Yes, you said big exchanges, but still, they are not as secure as you think.
You're definitely right, but there is a nuance to this. Most of these exchanges do make use of the cold storage too you know. They even employ more sophisticated means in securing their storage, much more than a single individual canthey spend a lot of money to achieve this. They use things like air-gapped offline wallets, multi-sig wallets, withdrawal limits, dedicated teams for this, etc.
If hackers can breach these, is it your meager setup they can't? These exchanges are like an honeypot; targeting individual with few Bitcoins and satoshis isn't as economical as targeting these honeypots.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying non-custodial/centralized exchanges are better, I'm just highlighting an important caveat in this premise. Self-custody is definitely a better option if you know how to properly secure your wallet in such a way that it would be less beneficial to put in too much resources to target youafterall, that's the main work in being a self-custodian in a space with heavy targets and bounty by malicious hackers.
