Wallet Logo

PalmPay - Cryptocurrency Point

Latest release: VARY ( 20th January 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 26th October 2021 . No source for current release found
10 thousand

Jump to verdict 

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing transparency with PalmPay - Cryptocurrency Point  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 

App Description

PalmPay is a point of sale system offered by Agorise, Ltd.

PalmPay enables any Business to accept any of the above, as well as the emerging Cryptos automatically, at zero cost. No setup fee, no monthly fee, no transaction fee, no fees whatsoever.

It is partnered with Bitshares, a decentralized platform.

PalmPay uses the decentralized Bitshares blockchain to process all customer payments. Private keys never leave PalmPay and all transactions are encrypted by default.

The Site

From the homepage, we see more information on Bitshares:

The Bitshares decentralized exchange (DEX) provides the platform which PalmPay utilizes. Using their DEX, you can freely move money between accounts, get a Loan, go public, pay bills, Trade and even invest in other assets.
They’re the bank that never closes, never needs a bailout, and can never steal your money. Bitshares is not a company. It’s a distributed network of computers all running the same software providing maximum uptime. So, stop trusting humans with your money and become your own bank!

The App

Upon signing up, the user is asked to import or setup a Bitshares account.

When creating a Bitshares account, users are requested to type a “5+ digit PIN” and are provided with a 12-word “brainkey.” We assume that this is the seed phrase.

It then asked us to “choose our desired smartcoin.” You are then asked to “select the assets to accept.” The default is Bitshares (BTS). There are other options including Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and others.

Once that is set up, the app shows an interface saying “pay with” and then you choose your selected coin or payment option.

With their website not claiming to be open source and a search for the app ID on Github yielding 0 results we assume there is no publicly available source code.

Verdict

This app is not verifiable.

(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.

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.