Qubic Restarts Chain and Opens Recovery Claims After $1.4M Seed Drain
By Crypto Wire
October 20, 2026
Qubic has restarted its layer-1 after the weak-seed drain that hit about 1,404 wallets for roughly $1.4 million / 2.94 trillion QU, and Computors have approved a recovery plan with a public claims window through May 1, 2027. The explorer shows ticks advancing again from about 8:00 p.m. on October 19, past the halt height 85,371,949 that froze the chain on Sunday. This UPDATE follows our halt chapter — Qubic Halts Chain After Weak Seeds Drain 1,404 Wallets of About $1.4 Million — with restart + reclaim as the new facts, not a rehash of the initial pause.
Affected holders can check an address and file on Qubic’s reclaim platform before the May 1, 2027 cutoff. Separately, the project’s Tuesday guidance is blunt for anyone who ever used the vulnerable web wallet: treat seeds created before web wallet 4.26.4 (released October 19) as insecure even if those wallets were never drained — update, create a new wallet, move funds, and abandon the old seed. That hygiene step sits beside restitution; it is not the same as a paid claim.
SlowMist’s October 20 postmortem tightens the root cause: the web wallet built 55-letter seeds with JavaScript Math.random() and no password or device entropy, while the same stream wrote a plaintext dejaVu header over TCP. Six consecutive header values were enough, in SlowMist’s local proof of concept, to rebuild the generator’s 128-bit state in about 15 milliseconds and predict seeds against public keys in balance requests. Affected creation paths include iPhone/iPad browsers, Mac Safari before Oct. 18, and the Qubic iOS app before July 2025. About 87.1% of stolen QU remains frozen on-chain; the other 12.9% hit MEXC, which froze the receiving account about an hour after deposit.
For NFT and GameFi desks that touch Qubic wallets or bridges, the practical cut is seed hygiene first: rotate off pre-4.26.4 web-wallet seeds before treating the reclaim portal as the whole story. Restitution size and timing still sit with the Computor quorum; do not assume every frozen or exchange-held QU auto-pays at 1:1 without reading the live claim terms. Scam risk rises around recovery windows — use only the official reclaim path Qubic publishes, and ignore DMs that ask for seeds or “unlock” fees.
Rug watch: Track claim fill rates through the May 1, 2027 window, whether MEXC’s freeze converts into returned QU, and whether SlowMist’s header-leak lesson shows up in other wallet bridges that still ship Math.random() seeds over plaintext telemetry.
Bottom line: Qubic is live again past tick 85,371,949, with Computor-approved reclaim claims open through May 1, 2027 — and SlowMist’s Oct. 20 write-up shows how six plaintext headers cracked the old web-wallet RNG.
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