Coinkite

A Toronto hardware company that makes the Coldcard signing device along with Opendime, Tapsigner, Satscard and other Bitcoin-only security products.

The company and the product are not the same thing

Coinkite Inc. is the company. Coldcard is one of its products. The distinction matters because Coldcard is the name most people know, and because the firmware is published separately from the business that sells the hardware.

Coinkite's own structured site data gives a founding date of 2012, and the Coldcard site states that Coldcard has been "made by Coinkite since 2017". So the company is roughly five years older than the device it is now identified with. Coldcard's own about page places the company in Toronto, Canada, and says the devices are "designed and assembled in Canada".

What it built

The current catalogue is wider than one signing device: Coldcard Q and Mk5, Opendime (a physical bearer stick that gives up its private key only once), Tapsigner and Satscard (NFC cards), Satschip, Seedplate, Blockclock displays and Coldpower. Coldcard's firmware is published as source and the company says its builds are reproducible, which means a buyer can check that the binary on the device corresponds to code they can read.

The names question

Coinkite publishes no individual names. Its blog posts carry a collective "Coinkite Team" byline, which the company explains "identifies Coinkite's internal contributors without inventing individual writers or exposing private employee information". Its about page describes the team only as "security engineers, product designers, and Bitcoiners". This entry therefore lists no people, which is the truthful outcome rather than a gap.

What it changed

Coldcard pushed air-gapped signing from a niche practice into a normal one. A device that never touches USB for anything but power, that takes a transaction in on a microSD card or a QR code and hands a signature back the same way, removes a whole class of attack that assumes a live connection to a computer. Listing here is not endorsement.

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