WHITEHATS PUT 52.37 COLDCARD BITCOIN IN A WYOMING TRUST — TO CLAIM THEM, A SIGNATURE ISN’T ENOUGH — THE THIEVES CAN SIGN TOO

On September 21, white-hat rescuers moved 52.37 bitcoin from the Coldcard exploit into one fresh address, with an OP_RETURN note pointing victims to a claims site, per Galaxy Research’s Alex Thorn. He puts it at 2.8% of the exploit’s total. SEAL 911 responder Nick Bax says he helped rescue roughly 50 BTC at the end of July that were “imminently going to be stolen.” The coins now sit with Crypto Recovery Trust, a Wyoming statutory trust that says it returns assets “to verified owners at no cost.”

Here is how you get them back, per The Crypto Times: sign a one-time message in your wallet, submit the signature “along with supporting records,” then wait through an ownership and source-of-funds review and a sanctions screen.

That order of events is the story. In bitcoin, a signature from the address is the normal proof you own it. Here it proves nothing. The flaw made seeds that could be rebuilt, so whoever rebuilt yours, rescuer or thief, can sign the same message you can. That is also why the rescue worked: the white hats could open these wallets for the same reason the thieves could. Once the key is not yours alone, proof falls back to paper, and the questions are a bank’s. Who are you, and where did the money come from?

The other 97% is not in the trust. Coinkite has said “a firmware update does not repair a seed already created on affected software.” If your seed came from the bad firmware, the fix is a new seed, not an update. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $86,309.