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Bitcoin Wallet - MaxWallet

Latest release: 3.7.3 ( 12th June 2019 ) 🔍 Last analysed 17th August 2021 . No source for current release found Not updated in a long time
10 thousand
25th March 2019

Jump to verdict 

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 

In Google Play we read the right claims:

Exclusive control of your wallet’s private keys.

and

Open source

But … this app was not updated in 18 months, has only one review which is about lost coins and the provider did not ask to contact support but asks details right there in public.

And that’s all we can find out as the website is for sale by a Japanese registrar. That’s the same domain they provide for their contact email.

This app is not verifiable and probably a scam.

Some more digging

So we decompiled the app using jadx and there we see it is a clone of BRD Bitcoin Wallet Bitcoin BTC No Source! . BRD is published under the MIT license and thus cloning is not a problem. A bit problematic might be that this wallet connects to BRD’s servers (HOST = "api.breadwallet.com").

To find out what modifications this wallet did to the original, one would probably figure out which version they cloned from, compile that BRD wallet and compare the decompilation of both apps.

(lw)

Verdict Explained

Without public source of the reviewed release available, this product cannot be verified!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

No Source!

Is the source code publicly available?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "No source for current release found".

A wallet that claims to not give the provider the means to steal the users’ funds might actually be lying. In the spirit of “Don’t trust - verify!” you don’t want to take the provider at his word, but trust that people hunting for fame and bug bounties could actually find flaws and back-doors in the wallet so the provider doesn’t dare to put these in.

Back-doors and flaws are frequently found in closed source products but some remain hidden for years. And even in open source security software there might be catastrophic flaws undiscovered for years.

An evil wallet provider would certainly prefer not to publish the code, as hiding it makes audits orders of magnitude harder.

For your security, you thus want the code to be available for review.

If the wallet provider doesn’t share up to date code, our analysis stops there as the wallet could steal your funds at any time, and there is no protection except the provider’s word.

“Up to date” strictly means that any instance of the product being updated without the source code being updated counts as closed source. This puts the burden on the provider to always first release the source code before releasing the product’s update. This paragraph is a clarification to our rules following a little poll.

We are not concerned about the license as long as it allows us to perform our analysis. For a security audit, it is not necessary that the provider allows others to use their code for a competing wallet. You should still prefer actual open source licenses as a competing wallet won’t use the code without giving it careful scrutiny.

But we also ask:

Obsolete!

Was the product updated during the last two years?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not updated in a long time".

Bitcoin wallets are complex products and Bitcoin is a new, advancing technolgy. Projects that don’t get updated in a long time are probably not well maintained. It is questionable if the provider even has staff at hands that is familiar with the product, should issues arise.

This verdict may not get applied if the provider is active and expresses good reasons for not updating the product.