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FatBTC

Latest release: 2.50 ( 26th July 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 10th October 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
2.7 ★★★★★
160 ratings
10 thousand
2nd June 2018

Jump to verdict 

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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.

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 

App Description

From Google Play:

FatBTC is a professional and secure bitcoin trading platform, providing bitcoin, ethereum market and hundreds of digital currency trading. This is the application dedicated to trade on FatBTC!

There’s nothing that really indicates the security of this app other than the fact that it is a trading platform.

The Site

Terms of Use

From the site’s User Agreement, 【USERS’ RIGHT AND LIMITATIONS TO LICENSE USE, 4:】

This website has the right to inquire, freeze or deduct the items and accounts of the user in according to the requirements of any applicable judicial organizations, administrative organizations and military organizations, including but not limited to public security organizations, procuratorial organizations, courts, customs, tax authorities and so on.

From 【CHANGE OF SERVICE, INTERRUPTION, TERMINATION, RESTRICTION, FREEZING】, 6:

You agree, to safeguard the security of your account and the digital assets within, fatbtc reserves the rights to freeze part or all of your assets (or in other words, to restrict you from accessing part or all of the Services) under the circumstances that fatbtc thinks your account is exposed to potential risks according to these Terms, laws, regulations, legal instruments, government requests dependent on administrative functions and powers and other conditions that fatbtc thinks fit.

The App

We tried the app. It is an exchange app, so you are required to register an account. It is possible to send and receive bitcoin via a QR code or btc address once you set a fund password. We were not provided with an option to backup our wallets.

Verdict

Due to the information we have collected thus far, our verdict for this app is custodial. As such, it is 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.