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Kikitrade：Buy Bitcoin & Crypto

Latest release: 4.4.10 ( 21st October 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 1st October 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
100 thousand
24th July 2020

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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 

Google Play

You can easily invest in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other major cryptocurrencies. Start with as low as $1USD.

It also mentions that it has:

Digital Asset Exchange Provider Qualification issued by the Australian government (AUSTRAC) ; Strict enforcement on KYC and AML

The Site

The Terms and Conditions mentions their compliance with AML/KYC.

Section 2.5 mentions:

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate, according to our sole discretion and without providing any prior notice, your registration or access to the Exchange or the Site, in the event that (i) when we reasonably suspect that you have breached any of the Agreement, (ii) when we reasonably suspect fraudulent or illegal activities, or (iii) when the Agreement has been terminated.

The terms also mentions:

In the instance of any private keys held and managed by Kikitrade, Kikitrade does not convey ownership or any related rights associated with the Users. You acknowledge and agree that Kikitrade assumes absolutely no responsibilities whatsoever in respect of an unsupported branch of a forked protocol.

Section 16 mentions:

If Kikitrade determines the Digital Asset is active on the Exchange has been compromised, Kikitrade may halt trading, deposits and withdrawals for such Digital Asset. If Kikitrade determines the Modification to greatly decrease the value in such Digital Asset, Kikitrade may discontinue trade activity on such Digital Asset entirely.

Termination of the service:

Without prejudice to other provisions (especially clause 11.1 above) in the Agreement, Kikitrade may terminate the Exchange, the Agreement and all rights granted hereunder immediately and without notice:

Initial assessment points to kikitrade as a centralized cryptocurrency exchange.

Tutorial

How to withdraw cryptocurrency from Kikitrade

The App

We downloaded and installed the app on our phone. Registration is through email or phone. Once we’ve verified our account, we then proceeded to the Profile > My Wallet > BTC. It has options to send and receive. There are no readily apparent methods to backup or import the bitcoin wallet.

Verdict

The wording about how kikitrade handles private keys in the Terms and Conditions plus the restrictions on withdrawals lend us to give a verdict of 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.
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.