Wallet Logo

CoinField

Latest release: 2.6.0 ( 26th July 2021 ) 🔍 Last analysed 2nd November 2022 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys Not updated in a while
3.4 ★★★★★
1231 ratings
50 thousand
16th May 2019

Jump to verdict 

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing the risks of centralized custodians with CoinField  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 

Taken from CoinField’s Play Store description:

CoinField is a regulated European-based fiat-to-crypto exchange, which operates in 193 countries globally. The trading platform, built with advanced technologies, allows fast trades, a smooth user experience, offers top-of-the-line security and has an extensive cryptocurrency portfolio worldwide.

CoinField is an exchange app and additionally, claims to be regulated. This makes our verdict for it lean towards a custodial nature.

Its transfer fees are indicated on this page.

From the User Agreement:

In the event of a suspension, the Company may limit your access to all or a portion of the Services and/or freeze or lock your Digital Assets to prevent you from withdrawing or trading your Digital Assets

Upon installing the app and registering an account, you are given a Demo Account. Accessing more features such as depositing BTC requires identity verification.

Under Section 5 of its Support Page:

CoinField™ uses 3 different advanced wallet technologies to keep assets and transactions safe: Cold Wallet: Cold storage wallets are kept offline in a secure safety deposit box that is only retrievable only if the two founders are present at the same time. This process protects our exchange from intrusion when hackers attempt to breach the platform. Hot Wallet: Enables accounting of digital currencies during an influx of deposit requests. Warm Wallet: Wallet for daily cash flow required by our platform operations that are stored in our digital Secret Vault for absolute maximum security.

Under Section 7 of the same:

Any suspicious account activity will immediately put the account on hold for administration review and verification.

Under Section 4 of the same:

We use Multi-sig wallets that require more than one key to authorize a digital transaction. This ensures the responsibility of transactions are delegated to make sure all transactions are legitimate.

This app is custodial therefore not verifiable.

(dg)

Verdict Explained

As the provider of this product holds the keys, verifiability of the product is not relevant to the security of the funds!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Custodial!

Is the product self-custodial?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys".

A custodial service is a service where the funds are held by a third party like the provider. The custodial service can at any point steal all the funds of all the users at their discretion. Our investigations stop there.

Some services might claim their setup is super secure, that they don’t actually have access to the funds, or that the access is shared between multiple parties. For our evaluation of it being a wallet, these details are irrelevant. They might be a trustworthy Bitcoin bank and they might be a better fit for certain users than being your own bank but our investigation still stops there as we are only interested in wallets.

Products that claim to be non-custodial but feature custodial accounts without very clearly marking those as custodial are also considered “custodial” as a whole to avoid misguiding users that follow our assessment.

This verdict means that the provider might or might not publish source code and maybe it is even possible to reproduce the build from the source code but as it is custodial, the provider already has control over the funds, so it is not a wallet where you would be in exclusive control of your funds.

We have to acknowledge that a huge majority of Bitcoiners are currently using custodial Bitcoin banks. If you do, please:

  • Do your own research if the provider is trust-worthy!
  • Check if you know at least enough about them so you can sue them when you have to!
  • Check if the provider is under a jurisdiction that will allow them to release your funds when you need them?
  • Check if the provider is taking security measures proportional to the amount of funds secured? If they have a million users and don’t use cold storage, that hot wallet is a million times more valuable for hackers to attack. A million times more effort will be taken by hackers to infiltrate their security systems.

But we also ask:

Stale!

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.