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ByteHub - Multiple Cryptocurre

Latest release: 1.4.3.210909 ( 9th September 2021 ) 🔍 Last analysed 2nd November 2022 . No source for current release found Not updated in a while
4.6 ★★★★★
7187 ratings
100 thousand
2nd February 2019

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Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing transparency with ByteHub - Multiple Cryptocurre  via their Twitter!

Do your own research!

Try out searching for "lost bitcoins", "stole my money" or "scammers" together with the wallet's name, even if you think the wallet is generally trustworthy. For all the bigger wallets you will find accusations. Make sure you understand why they were made and if you are comfortable with the provider's reaction.

If you find something we should include, you can create an issue or edit this analysis yourself and create a merge request for your changes.

The Analysis 

With ByteHub, you are able to store, send, buy or sell the most kinds of cryptocurrency available in the market. ByteHub is also a carrier for diverse third-party DAPPs. A whole blockchain ecology can be explored in one application.

So it’s a multi-utility application, and presumably you can send and receive BTC.

The Twitter account linked to bytetrade.io, although the Play Store app noticeably did not.

ByteTrade is the soil that hopes to help the entire community grow. The BTON public chain shares an excellent consensus mechanism with the community, and developers can build their own Dapp directly on it and enjoy great convenience.

Oddly, there was no link to the application. There wasn’t even a mention of a wallet.

Upon further research, the Facebook account links to byte-trade.com. There’s still no link back to the app.

As for info on self-custody, the help center had a short article on seed phrases.

Seed phrase/mnemonics is a private key that is not protected by any encryption. Once someone gets your seed phrase/mnemonics, it is equivalent to controlling your account and asset. The following points should be noted when using the seed phrase/mnemonics:

After creating an account in ByteTrade, be sure to back up the seed phrase/mnemonics in time and double-check to make sure it is correct.

Since the private key of the wallet is held by the client, this app is presumably self custodial. However, there is no source provided for this product.

To clear the situation, we sent an inquiry to ByteTradeIO on Twitter. The Twitter account has yet to respond. As it is inactive since two years, our hopes are not too high.

(dg)

Verdict Explained

Without public source of the reviewed release available, this product cannot be verified!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Is the source code publicly available?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "No source for current release found".

A wallet that claims to not give the provider the means to steal the users’ funds might actually be lying. In the spirit of “Don’t trust - verify!” you don’t want to take the provider at his word, but trust that people hunting for fame and bug bounties could actually find flaws and back-doors in the wallet so the provider doesn’t dare to put these in.

Back-doors and flaws are frequently found in closed source products but some remain hidden for years. And even in open source security software there might be catastrophic flaws undiscovered for years.

An evil wallet provider would certainly prefer not to publish the code, as hiding it makes audits orders of magnitude harder.

For your security, you thus want the code to be available for review.

If the wallet provider doesn’t share up to date code, our analysis stops there as the wallet could steal your funds at any time, and there is no protection except the provider’s word.

“Up to date” strictly means that any instance of the product being updated without the source code being updated counts as closed source. This puts the burden on the provider to always first release the source code before releasing the product’s update. This paragraph is a clarification to our rules following a little poll.

We are not concerned about the license as long as it allows us to perform our analysis. For a security audit, it is not necessary that the provider allows others to use their code for a competing wallet. You should still prefer actual open source licenses as a competing wallet won’t use the code without giving it careful scrutiny.

But we also ask:

Was the product updated during the last year?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not updated in a while".

Bitcoin wallets are complex products and Bitcoin is a new, advancing technolgy. Projects that don’t get updated in a year are probably not well maintained.

This verdict may not get applied if the provider is active and expresses good reasons for not updating the product.

The product cannot be independently verified. If the provider puts your funds at risk on purpose or by accident, you will probably not know about the issue before people start losing money. If the provider is more criminally inclined he might have collected all the backups of all the wallets, ready to be emptied at the press of a button. The product might have a formidable track record but out of distress or change in management turns out to be evil from some point on, with nobody outside ever knowing before it is too late.