Qubic restarts chain, opens claims after $1.4M wallet drain

Qubic has restarted its blockchain and opened a claims process for victims of last weekend's wallet drain, in which an attacker took roughly $1.4 million in QU tokens from 1,404 accounts, Cointelegraph reports, citing the project's latest update. We covered the original incident when Qubic halted its mainnet.

What changed this week

• Network back online: Qubic's explorer shows the chain processing ticks again from 8 p.m. on 19 October, moving past tick 85,371,949, where it had been stopped.
• Recovery plan approved: Qubic's validators, called Computors, signed off on a recovery plan.
• Claims open: affected holders can check their address and submit a claim on Qubic's reclaim platform until 1 May 2027.

Why the wallets were weak

Qubic says the code of the network itself was not broken. The problem was seed generation: on certain Apple devices and browsers, its web wallet relied on an insecure random-number generator that could produce predictable seeds. Anyone able to recreate a seed controls the wallet, which is why randomness matters so much. Our new explainer on what a seed phrase is walks through how seeds are created and protected.

What affected users should do

Qubic's advice is blunt: if you created your wallet with the Qubic web wallet before version 4.26.4 (released 19 October), treat it as insecure even if nothing was taken. Update to 4.26.4 or later, create a brand-new wallet, move the funds and never reuse the old one. For larger balances, a dedicated device helps; see what a hardware wallet is.

Still open: how much each claimant will recover and how the frozen funds, most of which never left the Qubic network, will be returned.