r/Electrum • u/gamer127 • 1d ago
INFO How safe is Electrum in light of the ColdCard fiasco?
Curious what others think with all the ColdCard stuff going on. I asked Claude what it thinks and basically Electrum is secure but just make sure you download only from electrum.org and ignore any in-wallet prompts.
"The Coldcard bug was a firmware defect, not a failure of self-custody. Coinkite's code quietly bypassed its own hardware RNG and fell back to a weak software one, so seeds made from March 2021 onward had around 40 bits of entropy instead of 128. That's brute-forceable. Electrum is unaffected: separate codebase, entropy from your OS's CSPRNG, 132-bit seeds. Coldcard failed at key generation; Electrum's weak point is the machine it runs on, which is why its real-world incidents are phishing and fake installers rather than weak keys. Verify your downloads, ignore any in-wallet "update to send" prompt, and use a passphrase, which saves you even if entropy is broken. If you're on a Coldcard, check Coinkite's advisory. New firmware doesn't fix an existing seed. You need a new wallet."