Coinkite Faces Questions Over Coldcard Review After $116M Bitcoin Theft

Coinkite CEO NVK is defending the security checks surrounding Coldcard after an exploit associated with an estimated $116 million in Bitcoin losses. In posts on X dated November 9, he said a new artificial-intelligence model detected the underlying flaw that human reviewers had missed. The claim has reopened discussion about the review process used before the vulnerability was exploited and the potential role of automated analysis in finding obscure defects.

The disagreement involves developer Luke Dashjr, who disputes NVK’s assessment of what human reviewers were capable of detecting. Crypto.news characterizes the issue as a Coldcard seed-generation exploit, while the other outlets describe it more generally as a security flaw or wallet hack. The central contest is therefore not over the reported loss figure, which is consistent across coverage, but over how the weakness survived review and whether an AI system could realistically have identified it.

CoinEdition, Crypto Economy and Crypto.news agree on the estimated $116 million impact and NVK’s assertion that AI-assisted analysis found the problem. CoinEdition additionally reports that Coldcard underwent at least two paid third-party reviews before the exploit, although the available summary does not state the complete scope of either review. Crypto Economy is the only outlet to quantify the affected footprint, putting it at more than 5,200 Bitcoin addresses between July and August 2026.

The episode places scrutiny on both vendor oversight and external assurance. NVK’s position relies partly on third-party reviews, yet the claim that the remaining issue was beyond human reviewers has been challenged by Dashjr. The supplied coverage does not resolve that technical dispute or explain how the seed-generation weakness was exploited, so the distinction between a missed vulnerability and an unreviewed design issue remains central to the debate.

Live market data show Bitcoin at $74,952, down 0.27% over 24 hours and 2.57% over seven days. Its market capitalization stands at $1.51 trillion within a total crypto market of $2.56 trillion, which is described as flat overall. The Fear & Greed reading is 32, placing the market in Fear. The next points to watch are further technical clarification, the scope of the cited third-party reviews and any response that resolves the dispute over human detectability; the available reports do not establish a broader market reaction to the Coldcard exploit.