Wallet Logo

Bitpie-Universal Crypto Wallet

Latest release: 5.0.118 ( 29th October 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 1st October 2021 . No source for current release found
3.5 ★★★★★
131 ratings
1st October 2019

Jump to verdict 

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing transparency with Bitpie-Universal Crypto Wallet  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 

(Analysis from Android review)

Update 2022-03-30: This app is not available anymore.

Update 2021-12-11: This app recently got very bad reviews, with people who lost funds. On the other hand we did review their hardware wallets, that might be out of stock but had recent firmware updates and are indeed reproducible.

Old Analysis

This app has bold claims:

Bitpie Wallet is the world’s leading multi-chain wallet

Many apps we review, claim to have a unique position somehow. For now we just assume it claims to be a wallet.

Access to BitHD Cold wallet;

What exactly does that mean? access to cold wallet sounds like an oxymoron assuming a cold wallet is defined as one that is offline. (Update: As we later found out, they also provide hardware wallets:

In how far a bluetooth connected hardware wallet can be considered a “cold” wallet is debatable though, too. But they share that hardware wallet’s source code, too.)

Here there are the key words we want to read:

As a true decentralized wallet, your private key will never leave the device.

It is non-custodial. At least so they claim. Let’s see if it is reproducible …

In the description we find no link to their source code. On the website …

(The provider might want to change those download links “Google down” could be mistaken as the link being “down” as in “unavailable”.)

Unfortunately we cannot find any code for the Android wallet and thus have to give the verdict: not verifiable.

(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.

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.