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CTP Wallet

Latest release: 1.4.2 ( 31st March 2021 ) 🔍 Last analysed 25th April 2022 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys Not functioning anymore
5 ★★★★★
1 ratings
25th January 2019

Jump to verdict 

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing the risks of centralized custodians with CTP 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 

Update 2022-04-05: This app is not available anymore.

(Analysis from Android review)

App Description

Modern currencies, securely stored in one single wallet. Send and receive with ease, while on the go, wherever you are. Support for all your favourite crypto currencies, on the web and on your mobile. Merchants and users around the globe love it, try it, it’s free and easy to use!

Termination, Suspension and Closure of Account in Terms and Conditions

We shall have a right to suspend or restrict the provision of our Services and/or suspend fulfilment of concluded Virtual (Currency) Asset Purchase and Sale Agreement and/or repudiate from concluded Virtual (Currency) Asset Purchase and Sale Agreement and/or refuse to complete, block or reverse a transaction initiated by you (even when funds are already debited), or terminate these General Terms unilaterally (without applying to court) where so required by legal acts and/or by any competent authority(-ies) with jurisdiction over our activities. The relevant measure shall be applied within a period established under such legal acts or established by the relevant competent authority(-ies). In case such legal acts and/or supervisory authority does not specify a relevant period, then a relevant period shall be determined at our own discretion.

The App

We were not able to register because of an error that we posted on a screenshot on Twitter

We signed in via the web app. There was no mention of the private keys, seeds, or mnemonic. We could not find options pertaining to those.

Verdict

A service that can “refuse to complete, block or reverse a transaction initiated” by the user, is markedly custodial. This makes the app 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.

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.