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Monedero: Wallet Bitcoin, Ethe

Latest release: 4.1.0 ( 25th June 2021 ) 🔍 Last analysed 1st July 2022 . No source for current release found Not updated in a while
1 thousand
13th March 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 

App Description

Translated from Spanish:

This Bitcoin Wallet in Spanish is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and seeks to eliminate the technical barriers that exist to use cryptocurrencies, privileging the security of users so that they never stop owning their own private keys. With Wallet only you have access to your private key.

It looks like this app is a bitcoin wallet, and it makes claims of being self-custodial.

Your cryptocurrency wallet currently supports Bitcoin (BTC), Dash (DASH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), Tether (USDT), Bitcoin SV (BSV), USD Coin (USDC), 0x (ZRX) and TrueUSD (TUSD).

The Site

Here’s the information they have on security:

In Wallet we do not have access to your private key . We encrypt your private key with SHA-256 using the password that you have set and we keep it replicated in three different distributed locations, through IPFS. It is impossible to access your private key without your password. In turn, we ask you to answer three secret questions, which we use to encrypt your password with which you created your Wallet account . These three responses are also saved and replicated in three different locations. In this way, if you forget your password, you will be able to recover it using your answer to the security questions. The password is encrypted with the Bcrypt algorithm.

Termination

From the Terms:

Monedero reserves the right to cancel the services of any user who is part of any crime committed through the use of the software. Monedero regularly collaborates with the authorities of different jurisdictions.

It is possible for Monedero to suspend your account. However, this does not necessarily mean they have access to the money inside.

The App

Creating an account is mandatory. There is no KYC, all you need to do is set a password and verify via email. There’s an option to obtain and import the mnemonic in the settings.

  • To access the 12 words, you have to enter your account’s password.
  • We were able to import the 12 word mnemonic it provided.

You can send and receive BTC via address or QR code.

Verdict

With no information on available source code or a link to any repository, we will assume that this project does not provide publicly available source code.

(lw, dg)

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:

Stale!

Was the product updated during the last year?

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

Bitcoin wallets are complex products and Bitcoin is a new, advancing technolgy. Projects that don’t get updated in a year are probably not well maintained.

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

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.