Cybersecurity company GK8 has announced that it is offering a bounty of up to a quarter of a million dollars to anyone that can hack its Bitcoin wallet.
Unhackable Bitcoin wallet
Calling it a “hack-proof digital vault,” the company describes its cold wallet crypto storage solution as the “first TRUE cold wallet for executing the entire digital asset management process without an Internet connection.”
GK8 is so confident in the security of its wallet that the company is offering a bounty of up to US$250,000 [AU$370,300] to anyone who can successfully hack its Bitcoin wallet.
The bug bounty will begin on February 3, 2020, at which time the address of the wallet and live transaction information will be provided.
Bounty participants will have exactly twenty-four hours to try to hack GK8’s Bitcoin cold wallet, which will contain $125,000 in BTC.
The first person to successfully hack the wallet and provide a “satisfactory explanation” as to how he or she did it will not only receive all of the Bitcoin in the wallet but additional rewards as well, totaling up to $250,000.
Speaking about the bug bounty, Lior Lamesh, the co-founder and CEO of GK8 said: “We dare the hackers of the world to take a stab at cracking it, but they won’t be able to.”
BitFi was supposed to be unhackable too
GK8 isn’t the first to boast an unhackable cold wallet. In June of 2018, John McAfee-backed BitFi made the same claim, calling its crypto wallet “the first unhackable, open-source hardware wallet.”
“Bitfi pulled out all the stops to ensure that the private key can never be obtained by illicit means. No other hardware wallet has ever been built to this level of sophistication,” McAfee declared at the time.
BitFi also offered a $250,000 bug bounty to anyone who could successfully hack its crypto wallet, however, unlike GK8, hackers had to pay to play.
Anyone wanting to participate in the bounty had to purchase a BitFi wallet that would supposedly come pre-loaded with $10 in BTC.
The reason for the purchase requirement, BitFi claimed at the time, was to “ensure serious inquiries only.”
The first person to hack their crypto wallet and remove the pre-loaded BTC would be declared the winner and receive the bounty.
In August of 2018, the wallet was hacked not once, but twice, and BitFi was forced to remove the “unhackable” claim from its website.