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PayBito - Trade Bitcoin and Crypto

Latest release: 2.2.11 ( 28th January 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 16th February 2022 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys Not functioning anymore
4.5 ★★★★★
255 ratings
10 thousand
24th October 2019

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Please help us spread the word discussing the risks of centralized custodians with PayBito - Trade Bitcoin and Crypto  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 

Update 2022-02-03: This app is no more.

App Description

From the app description:

PayBito helps you manage your portfolio, buy & sell cryptocurrencies and send & receive crypto straight from your phone.

PayBito primarily advertises itself as a trading platform. It offers support for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, or even altcoins.

We have no word on security other than Paybito’s claim that it will:

Secure your funds with heavy data encryption

One would also wonder what is the relationship of this app to PayBito Custody - Secure Crypto Storage Few Users Defunct! . Notably they are from the same provider.

The Site

Interestingly, the linked website in the store page leads to the company’s website while the privacy policy leads to what appears to be the app’s website.

From the Terms of Use we find that Paybito keeps your assets in custody (4.1):

We strive to protect your crypto assets from unauthorized access, use, or spending. We use a variety of physical and technical measures designed to protect our systems and your crypto assets. By remitting your crypto assets to PayBito Account you entrust and entitle Us to ultimately take decisions on the safety and security of your crypto assets.

The App

We tried the app and registered.

There are many identity verification tiers which qualifies users for different limits. Users can send and receive bitcoins through a wallet that’s generated on the platform.

Verdict

This app is custodial and thus 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:

Defunct!

Is the product still supported by the still existing provider?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not functioning anymore".

Discontinued products or worse, products of providers that are not active anymore, are problematic, especially if they were not formerly reproducible and well audited to be self-custodial following open standards. If the provider hasn’t answered inquiries for a year but their server is still running or similar circumstances might get this verdict, too.