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Dex-Trade

Latest release: 2.1.5 ( 20th September 2021 ) 🔍 Last analysed 21st October 2022 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys Not updated in a while
3.8 ★★★★★
5 ratings
28th January 2020

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Please help us spread the word discussing the risks of centralized custodians with Dex-Trade  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

Dextrade is an exchange, and supports bitcoin as well as other cryptocurrencies. It advertises itself as a

Cryptocurrency trading platform with extremely low commissions.

There is an alarming amount of negative reviews with users reporting that they had faced errors when trying to withdraw money, resulting in their funds getting trapped, with some scam accusation thrown in here and there.

Saurabh Verma
★☆☆☆☆ August 29, 2021
Hi, this exchange is a scam, they steal crypto of customers. I sent my crypto to them but it’s not deposited. I contacted them for support that my crypto is lost but they kept on passing time for weeks that team is working. Mine loss was 1000$. Guys There are other exchanges to trade please don’t get into their trap they are more or less a scammers

Daniel Anderka
★☆☆☆☆ July 31, 2021
Terrible and useless don’t use this exchange, deposits and withdrawals can take weeks to be carried out. Same with trades. Completely useless customer service. Go to another trading platform.

The Site

In the official homepage, Dex-trade states that funds are stored in cold wallets.

More than 95% of currencies in cold wallets

User Agreement

From the User Agreement:

In case of finding or suspecting any inappropriate activity related to your Account, Dex-Trade.com may request additional information, including document authentication, or freezing of transactions in order to review them. You will be obliged to comply with these requests, otherwise you agree that your Account will be closed.

Verdict

This app is custodial and thus 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:

Stale!

Was the product updated during the last year?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not updated in a while".

Bitcoin wallets are complex products and Bitcoin is a new, advancing technolgy. Projects that don’t get updated in a year are probably not well maintained.

This verdict may not get applied if the provider is active and expresses good reasons for not updating the product.

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.