Canadian bitcoin firm Coinkite facing proposed class-action lawsuit after $140-million hack — SkimNews
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- Coinkite Inc. faces a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging negligence and breach of contract after a firmware flaw allowed hackers to steal over $140 million in bitcoin from users’ Coldcard wallets.
- Rodolfo Novak and Peter Gray, Coinkite’s co-founders, are named as defendants alongside the company for failing to warn users of a critical vulnerability in Coldcard devices that compromised seed phrase randomness.
- Coldcard wallets contained a coding error introduced in 2021 that made seed phrases predictable, undermining the core security of the offline storage devices once considered highly secure.
- James O’Beirne, a bitcoin engineer, reportedly identified the flaw and notified Coinkite in May 2025, according to the lawsuit, which claims the company failed to act promptly to protect users.
- Amir Naderi, a Los Angeles resident, is the named plaintiff in the proposed class action, having lost approximately $79,763.74 in bitcoin during the hack.
- Coinkite issued a software patch this year for the vulnerability but requires users to generate new seed phrases and migrate funds, a process that may leave unaware users still at risk.
Why it matters: Bitcoin holders who use Coldcard devices face ongoing exposure if they haven’t manually applied the fix, and Coinkite’s liability could set a precedent for hardware wallet makers’ duty to disclose and remediate security flaws. The case centers on whether a technical failure becomes legal negligence.
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