Over 1,800 BTC Stolen, Coinkite CTO Allegedly Ignored RNG Code Warnings a Year in Advance
2026-08-04 15:18
Odaily Planet Daily reported that Bitcoin News posted on X platform, stating that new evidence suggests the anonymous account "switck," who wrote the LibNgU code, may actually be Peter Gray, Co-founder and CTO of Coinkite. This code is at the center of the COLDCARD entropy failure incident.
Researchers claim that Gray's GPG key signed dozens of commits by switck, and other identifiers appear to link the two identities together.
Bitcoin developer James O'Beirne stated that he had warned Coinkite in May 2025 that the RNG implementation of LibNgU looked suspicious and recommended removing it, but he said the other party responded that if there were issues, they would have already been discovered.
Screenshots also show that as early as April 2021, users had already raised questions about the LibNgU rewrite.
If these findings are accurate, it means that the engineer who introduced the code was later linked to the theft of over 1,800 BTC, and had received direct warnings about the RNG implementation more than a year before the vulnerability was publicly disclosed.
Researchers claim that Gray's GPG key signed dozens of commits by switck, and other identifiers appear to link the two identities together.
Bitcoin developer James O'Beirne stated that he had warned Coinkite in May 2025 that the RNG implementation of LibNgU looked suspicious and recommended removing it, but he said the other party responded that if there were issues, they would have already been discovered.
Screenshots also show that as early as April 2021, users had already raised questions about the LibNgU rewrite.
If these findings are accurate, it means that the engineer who introduced the code was later linked to the theft of over 1,800 BTC, and had received direct warnings about the RNG implementation more than a year before the vulnerability was publicly disclosed.
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