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BitKan: Trade Bitcoin & Crypto

Latest release: 8.5.13 ( 9th June 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 21st October 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
4.6 ★★★★★
72 ratings
24th June 2015

Jump to verdict 

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing the risks of centralized custodians with BitKan: Trade Bitcoin & Crypto  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)

App Description

BitKan is a one-stop investment service platform for Bitcoin. BitKan provides multiple services such as Market Price Watch, Informations, Community K Site, Digital Wallets.

The Site

User Agreement

您可以使用钱包来保存钱包支持的货币和数字代币及其对应的钱包支付密码和私钥。 为免生疑问，Bikan平台的数字钱包服务不包括：（1）存储用户密码安全问题及答案； (2) 冻结钱包； (3) 挂失钱包； (4) 恢复钱包； (5)回滚传输。

According to Google Translate:

You can use the wallet to keep the currency and the digital tokens supported by the wallet and their corresponding wallet payment passwords and private keys.

For the avoidance of doubt, the digital wallet service of the Bikan platform does not include: (1) store user password security questions and answers; (2) freeze the wallet; (3) report the loss of the wallet; (4) restore the wallet; (5) roll back the transfer.

The App

We downloaded the app and registered. We then tried looking for the private keys.

Note that Bitkan has on several occassions referred to private keys in these articles:

Institutional Custody Will Challenge Retail-Oriented Crypto, What are Private Keys and Why Are They Important and Proof of Keys: A critical Test for bitcoin.

Despite these articles, we were not able to locate any information pertaining to the keys on their platform. The articles merely referred to them as educational material.

Contact

Absent credible proof or documentation where the private keys are stored, we reached out to Bitkan via Twitter to ask.

Verdict

While waiting for their reply, we are going to assume that as the keys are not actually accessible or viewable at the moment. In that case, we are compelled to mark this app as custodial unless there is further update or clarification from the providers. Thus, this app is not verifiable.

(dg)

Verdict Explained

As the provider of this product holds the keys, verifiability of the product is not relevant to the security of the funds!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Custodial!

Is the product self-custodial?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys".

A custodial service is a service where the funds are held by a third party like the provider. The custodial service can at any point steal all the funds of all the users at their discretion. Our investigations stop there.

Some services might claim their setup is super secure, that they don’t actually have access to the funds, or that the access is shared between multiple parties. For our evaluation of it being a wallet, these details are irrelevant. They might be a trustworthy Bitcoin bank and they might be a better fit for certain users than being your own bank but our investigation still stops there as we are only interested in wallets.

Products that claim to be non-custodial but feature custodial accounts without very clearly marking those as custodial are also considered “custodial” as a whole to avoid misguiding users that follow our assessment.

This verdict means that the provider might or might not publish source code and maybe it is even possible to reproduce the build from the source code but as it is custodial, the provider already has control over the funds, so it is not a wallet where you would be in exclusive control of your funds.

We have to acknowledge that a huge majority of Bitcoiners are currently using custodial Bitcoin banks. If you do, please:

  • Do your own research if the provider is trust-worthy!
  • Check if you know at least enough about them so you can sue them when you have to!
  • Check if the provider is under a jurisdiction that will allow them to release your funds when you need them?
  • Check if the provider is taking security measures proportional to the amount of funds secured? If they have a million users and don’t use cold storage, that hot wallet is a million times more valuable for hackers to attack. A million times more effort will be taken by hackers to infiltrate their security systems.
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.