AnchorWatch Becomes a Nevada-Chartered Bitcoin Custodian Days After Its CEO Dissected the Ledger Hack

AnchorWatch Trust Company opened as a Nevada-chartered qualified Bitcoin custodian on October 19, CEO Rob Hamilton said on Simply Bitcoin's live show from Lugano, days after he spent months dissecting two of the worst hardware wallet failures in Bitcoin's history.

A NEVADA CHARTER AND $370 MILLION IN INSURANCE

AnchorWatch Trust Company, a Nevada state-chartered trust company and qualified custodian, opened October 19 to provide qualified Bitcoin custody, authorized by the Nevada Financial Institutions Division to act as a custodian. Clients can choose a flagship model where AnchorWatch holds the keys required for qualified custody while the client's trustees or executives hold additional keys, or a multi-institution model that distributes key control across AnchorWatch, BitGo in the United States and CoinCorner in the Isle of Man. As a Lloyd's of London Coverholder, AnchorWatch has authority to write policies up to a $370 million limit per client. Hamilton said monthly custody fees are capped at $10,000 regardless of how large a client's holdings grow, a fixed-dollar structure meant to replace the percentage-of-assets fees typical of custodians like Coinbase.

HOW THE COLDCARD HACK DREW HAMILTON INTO SECURITY WORK

Hamilton's path to building a chartered custodian ran through the Coldcard entropy bug that began draining wallets on July 30, 2026. Attackers drained roughly 1,816 BTC, about $116 million at the time, from more than 5,200 Bitcoin addresses whose seeds had been generated on a Coldcard, with none of the devices connected to the internet or physically stolen, because a firmware bug made those seeds guessable for more than five years. Hamilton said he personally confirmed the proof of concept once a researcher flagged the exact flaw in the code and sent it to Coinkite, and watched the company treat it as a "full-alarm fire" once the evidence was undeniable. He and developer Calle spun up what became known as the Bitcoin Red Team within days, scanning Bitcoin repositories with AI models to find other latent bugs before anyone else could exploit them.

WHY BITCOIN'S OWN CODE CAME OUT CLEANER THAN LINUX

Hamilton said the Red Team's scans found nothing critical in Bitcoin Core or the libsecp256k1 signature library, in contrast to flaws found elsewhere in the software world, including a batch of vulnerabilities recently disclosed in the Linux kernel. He credited that gap to how narrowly scoped Bitcoin's own protocol is, since it handles block headers, keys and transactions and little else, compared to a full operating system like Linux. He also said the Red Team's scans of other hardware wallets turned up no other entropy bugs anywhere close to the severity of Coldcard's, which he called the first real-world evidence that the rest of the hardware wallet field was not hiding the same class of flaw.

THE LEDGER SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACK, EXPLAINED THROUGH A PURCHASE IN SINGAPORE

Hamilton walked through a separate and more recent incident: a supply chain attack on Ledger devices sold through resellers rather than Ledger's own store. Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès examined a Ledger device he said he bought with its shrink wrap intact, describing a second circuit board concealed where the screen's padding is supposed to sit, an antenna attached by a single wire, and an LTE module with a data eSIM. The implant captured seed phrases through display output and button press monitoring, then transmitted the data via embedded eSIM and LTE connectivity. Hamilton said the attack worked because the compromised devices still passed Ledger's own authenticity check, and that losses tied to the reseller have been estimated above $90 million. He said the core lesson for buyers is the same one he gives for any hardware wallet: buy directly from the manufacturer, never from a third-party reseller, however official the storefront looks.

WHAT HAMILTON TELLS PEOPLE ABOUT SELF-CUSTODY NOW

Hamilton pushed back on the idea that either incident proves self-custody has failed. He argued Bitcoin's entire value proposition depends on coins being spread across self-custodied wallets rather than concentrated at a handful of custodians, the way most gold sits in a small number of vaults. His practical advice: do not force every holder into complex multi-signature setups if they are not ready for them, but do test backups and practice a spend at least once a year so a recovery is not the first time it is attempted under pressure. For anyone holding an amount that would cause real psychological or financial harm if lost, he suggested splitting it, roughly cutting the threshold for serious distress in half as the point to start spreading funds across more than one setup.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.