Joe Grand: From L0pht's Kingpin to Locked Crypto Wallets

Joe Grand was the youngest hacker at the table when seven members of the L0pht told the United States Senate, in 1998, that the internet was dangerously fragile.

He went by Kingpin then, and he still does. In the years since, he invented the electronic conference badge, co-hosted a Discovery Channel engineering show and became the person people email when a fortune in cryptocurrency is locked inside a device they can no longer open.

Not bad for a kid who, a few years before that Senate hearing, was sitting in a police station after a break-in at a phone company.

Joe Grand at a Glance

• Born in Boston in 1975, Grand got hooked on electronics at seven, playing on his older brother's Atari 400, and was dialing into bulletin board systems by age ten.
• As a teenager in the hacking crew Renegade Legion, he took part in a break-in at a Michigan Bell facility. The youngest of the group, he was let go without charges while friends picked up felonies.
• He joined the Boston hacker collective L0pht Heavy Industries in his mid-teens, after his parents agreed to pay his share of the rent if he ran track.
• On May 19, 1998, he testified before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs as Kingpin, alongside Mudge, Weld Pond, Space Rogue and the rest of the L0pht.
• The L0pht merged into the security startup @stake in January 2000. Grand founded his own firm, Grand Idea Studio, in 2002.
• In 2006 he designed the first electronic DEF CON badge, then did the next four years' badges too, kicking off the "badgelife" subculture.
• He co-hosted Discovery Channel's Prototype This!, which premiered in October 2008 and ran for one season.
• In 2022 he published a video showing how he glitched a Trezor hardware wallet to recover $2 million in cryptocurrency. Two years later he and a collaborator cracked an 11-year-old password protecting roughly $3 million in bitcoin.
• Today he runs Grand Idea Studio from Portland, Oregon, teaches hardware hacking classes around the world and keeps the wallet stories coming on YouTube.

The Life of Joe Grand

Grand's Early Years

Joe Grand was born in Boston in 1975, and the machine that set his course was a hand-me-down. His older brother had an Atari 400, and when the brother drifted toward music, seven-year-old Joe inherited the computer.

Games came first, then writing his own, then a modem and the bulletin board systems behind it.

The best boards were long-distance calls from Boston, and his parents weren't paying those bills. His brother handed him the workaround: an 800 number and six-digit codes that made calls free, which Grand later admitted he knew "wasn't right" even as it felt normal.

Renegade Legion

By his early teens, Grand had fallen in with a BBS crew called Renegade Legion. They wrote text files on phone phreaking and credit-card fraud, war-dialed for open modems and treated the phone network as a playground.

Nothing felt like an attack on a person, he told Darknet Diaries in 2025. "I never thought I was harming anyone."

Then came a winter break in Michigan. Six members of the crew went after a Michigan Bell facility, cutting fences and smashing the windows of service vans to grab manuals and telephone test equipment.

One of them was caught on the spot with a stolen scanner radio, a neighbor had already called the police about rowdy kids out past curfew, and the rest turned themselves in the next day. Grand, the youngest, walked away without a charge. Several of his friends didn't.

His parents handed down an ultimatum: get a job or join a sport. He picked the track team.

Joining the L0pht

Grand had known the L0pht crowd since he was 12 or 13, from the same bulletin boards. After the Michigan mess, they invited him into the core group, with one condition: everyone paid rent on the space.

He was still in high school and broke, so his parents covered it, in exchange for the running. That bargain put a teenager inside what he calls "possibly the first hacker space in the US," an artists' loft with old wood floors, a pile of salvaged Apples and PCs and a VAX 11/780.

The crew published vulnerability advisories, built the password cracker L0phtCrack and sold T-shirts to keep the lights on. From Count Zero and the others, Grand absorbed the lesson he still repeats: the point of hacking is to share what you learn, not hoard it.

He went on to a computer engineering degree at Boston University.

Seven Hackers Before the Senate

On May 19, 1998, the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs held a hearing titled Weak Computer Security in Government: Is the Public at Risk? Seven witnesses testified under their handles: Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Mudge, Space Rogue, Stefan von Neumann, Tan and Weld Pond.

Mudge delivered the line that made headlines: any of the seven could take down the internet in about 30 minutes. The senators compared them to modern-day Paul Reveres.

Grand's prepared statement introduced him as the youngest member of the group and one of its hardware hackers, working on embedded systems and surveillance tools.

The hearing made the L0pht famous. In January 2000, the group merged into a venture-backed startup called @stake, which Symantec bought in 2004 for $49 million. Grand, who says he can't stand being told what to do, didn't stick around for that.

Grand Idea Studio

In 2002, Grand founded Grand Idea Studio, a product-design and consulting shop that's still his home base.

In 2004 he was the lead author of Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty and Game Console Hacking, books that treated warranty stickers as an invitation. He co-founded Chumby Industries, maker of a deliberately open and hackable internet appliance, and later designed the JTAGulator, an open-source board for discovering debug ports on other people's hardware.

Badgelife Begins

In 2005 Grand built a custom circuit board for a Black Hat training class. DEF CON founder Jeff Moss saw it and told him to make one for the conference.

The DEF CON 14 badge in 2006 was simple: a tiny six-pin microcontroller and some blinking lights on a board shaped like the DEF CON logo. It was the first electronic conference badge anyone could remember seeing.

Grand designed the next four as well, each stranger than the last. The DEF CON 16 badge looked like a ninja with an infrared eye and an SD card slot; the DEF CON 17 badge listened through a microphone and answered a 2600 Hz tone in Morse code.

Those five badges spawned "badgelife," the sprawling subculture of independent electronic badges that now fills DEF CON every August. Grand came back for DEF CON 27 in 2019.

Prototype This!

The production company behind MythBusters cast Grand as one of four engineers on Prototype This!, which premiered on Discovery Channel on October 15, 2008.

The show gave the team impossible deadlines, sometimes two weeks, to build 14-foot boxing robots, an endless water slide, a personal airbag for falls and a pizza-delivering robot.

It lasted one season of 13 episodes, done in by production costs. Grand says he felt relief, then an unexpected sadness when there was suddenly nothing to build.

The $2 Million Trezor

In 2018, New York entrepreneur Dan Reich and a friend put about $50,000 into the cryptocurrency Theta and parked it on a Trezor One hardware wallet. By the end of the year they'd forgotten the PIN.

They guessed wrong 12 times and stopped, because the device wipes itself after 16. Then Theta surged in 2021, the stranded tokens were briefly worth more than $3 million, and Reich emailed Grand.

Grand spent about 12 weeks on it. The method was fault injection: dropping the chip's voltage for a few nanoseconds at precisely the right moment, so the microcontroller skips its own security check and lets him read memory.

The opening was a flaw in old Trezor firmware that left a copy of the PIN and recovery seed in RAM during an update. The maker had fixed it in 2017, but Reich's device was still running the old code. When the automated rig finally hit, the wallet's screen read "Hack the planet."

The video he posted in January 2022, How I hacked a hardware crypto wallet and recovered $2 million, has been watched nearly 10 million times. It also summoned a plague of imposters: fake Joe Grand accounts on every platform, offering to "recover" victims' crypto for a fee.

Hacking Time

A European owner he calls Michael got in touch in 2022 with a different problem. In 2013 he'd generated a 20-character password with the RoboForm password manager and stored it in an encrypted file that later corrupted. The wallet held 43.6 bitcoin.

Grand turned him down at first; there was no hardware to glitch. He changed his mind in 2023 and brought in Bruno, a German wallet hacker, to reverse-engineer the 2013 version of RoboForm.

They found that its "random" password generator was seeded with the computer's date and time, a flaw RoboForm fixed in 2015. So they generated every password the software could've produced in the window when Michael set up the wallet, and in November they hit it: created May 15, 2013, at 4:10:40 PM GMT.

By the time Wired told the story in May 2024, the coins were worth roughly $3 million. Grand's video on the job is titled, fittingly, I hacked time.

Joe Grand: Still Hacking the Planet

Grand's career is the hacker ethos running in a straight line: curiosity, taking things apart, and handing the knowledge to whoever comes next. The teenager who shouldn't have been inside that phone company became the engineer explaining voltage glitching to 10 million strangers.

He still runs Grand Idea Studio from Portland, teaches hardware hacking classes around the world, and in 2025 was telling the L0pht's oral history and presenting "Adventures of Wallet Hacking, Chapter 2" at conferences. He's booked to teach at Hardwear.io in Amsterdam in November 2026.

He's also said he owns no cryptocurrency himself. The locks are more interesting than what's behind them.