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Coincast — Send Crypto

Latest release: 1.2.14 ( 8th May 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 11th April 2022 . No source for current release found
4.8 ★★★★★
24 ratings
21st July 2021

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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.

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The Analysis 

(Analysis from Android review)

App Description

Coincast is a wallet that supports Bitcoin and Ethereum. The description claims that users have access to their private keys.

It also advertises a feature that allows the sending of crypto through a text message.

You simply text the crypto to a specific phone number and Coincast does the rest. The funds will be stored in an intermediary wallet with high-entropy access via a withdraw code which gets texted to your recipient. This code can be used at any time in the future by them to access the intermediary wallet and withdraw the funds. They do not need a Coincast account to receive funds. They can, at a future date, create a Coincast wallet and withdraw the funds into their wallet.

Here is a paragraph concerning the wallet’s security.

Coincast utilizes Recoverable Private Key (RPK) technology. Your private keys are never stored anywhere, they are regenerated from scratch as you need them via complex/secure algorithms which utilize your PIN and “random bits”. If you get a new device, you can regenerate your wallet on that device with your PIN, transferring is easy and secure. PINs are easier to remember, being only 8 or 9 characters in length depending on your device’s processing power.

Verdict

Nowhere on Coincast’s website is it stated that the wallet is open-source. We searched Github but it did not return any relevant results either. Coincast qualifies as a non-custodial wallet, but otherwise there is no indication that Coincast’s source code is available for review.

(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.