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Dsdaq - Trade stock, gold, oil

Latest release: 3.0.4 ( 20th January 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 30th September 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
5 ★★★★★
510 ratings
10 thousand
24th December 2019

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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.

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The Analysis 

Google Play

Dsdaq’s app description explains that it is a trading app:

Dsdaq: the only one mobile App allowing you to use Bitcoin, ETH and USDT to trade 300+ popular financial assets including Stocks, Indices, Gold, Oil, Silver, Forex, ETFs, Futures, etc.

It also has a P2P trading capability

Terms and Conditions

We took note of several key terms in the Terms and Conditions:

Termination & Remedies for Breach of these Terms

  1. Dsdaq reserves the right at our own discretion to close Your Account with at least 24-hour notice. If at the expiry of that period, your positions are still open, Dsdaq will close them.
  2. Dsdaq may freeze any Account in the event that Dsdaq suspects or have evidence that You are engaged in suspicious trading or other activity or have breached any of the above terms or warranties. This may result in the unwinding of any trades You have entered into, including the liquidation of any open positions. Dsdaq expressly exclude any losses or profits You would have made as a result of us closing

Dsdaq also utilizes KYC verification, as seen in Eligibility, number 8.

Dsdaq reserves the right at any time to verify Your identity for the purposes of complying with the any KYC/AML requirements

Thus we can assume that this trading app is custodial and 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.
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.