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Black Arrow Software eWallet

🔍 Last analysed 4th April 2022 . No source for current release found Not functioning anymore

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Please help us spread the word discussing transparency with Black Arrow Software eWallet  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 

⚠️ Note: There are multiple serious allegations on Blackarrow Software’s available social media accounts including Facebook and bitcointalk.

A Reddit post from r/Bitcoin in 2015 stated that eWallet was “just released.”

It’s presumed that Black Arrow Software, the company providing this product, is no longer active. The official website is down and the Twitter account hasn’t seen any activity since 2017.

Here is an archived version of the product’s page. From the description:

This is a hardware wallet designed to protect your Bitcoins.

eWallet is a lot better than a paper wallet, better than banking security. It effectively provides best protection in the industry. It produces a paper wallet for backup that can be used to restore your coins should the device fail or get lost.

An image from the page shows that the user would have been able to sign transactions on the hardware device as well as allow the user to confirm the address where the cryptocurrency would be sent.

Below are the advertised features:

  • 100% Trezor compatible, can be updated from mytrezor.com with the latest firmware.
  • Truly wearable: it does not require a cable to connect to your laptop and smaller than Trezor.
  • Open source code
  • Can be safely used on a infected computer even with a keylogger installed
  • This wallet never exposes the private keys to the outside world to keep your coins always safe.
  • All transactions are signed by the wallet.
  • Embedded screen ensures that you sign the transaction that you really intend to.

Verdict

The company has a seriously extensive history when it comes to the bitcoin community. There were allegations that Black Arrow Software merely copied the Trezor firmware and altered the bootloader and the license.

As it uses Trezor’s firmware, we have to assume that this wallet was also able to generate keys offline and sign transactions. Using Trezor’s firmware does not make this product fake (as Trezor’s license allows clones), but it should be noted that there’s no available source code for this product which would be a violation of Trezor’s license. If the firmware was modified in some way the users would have been unable to view the changes.

From a blogpost in 2015 that reviewed this wallet:

Initial impressions leave me confident that they have made modifications and customizations to Trezor code that they have not yet published.

This product does not have any source code available for review.

With the site down and the company’s social media inactive, we have to assume that this product is now defunct.

(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:

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.