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Maiar

Latest release: 1.5.7 ( 25th October 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 5th January 2022 . No source for current release found
4.7 ★★★★★
377 ratings
31st January 2021

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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.

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The Analysis 

(Analysis from Android review)

Maiar is a digital wallet and global payments app that is reimagining the way we interact with money, allowing you to exchange and securely store crypto on your mobile phone.

Create a wallet in seconds. No username, no password, no recovery phrase to backup. Just use your phone number.

It’s rather unclear if this means there’s no recovery phrase provided at all or if it’s simply optional.

Control your crypto. Be your own bank. At Maiar we help you protect your crypto with the highest level of security via cryptography and privacy features.

We’re approaching security through a process called progressive security. When having nothing to lose, you start light, and gradually receive security suggestions proportional to the assets you store. The more you use the app, the more sophisticated security features are triggered, to help you stay safe and secure.

This seemed to be a relevant piece of information regarding security.

Maiar.com has an FAQ on the homepage.

Is Maiar a custodial or non-custodial wallet?

The Maiar wallet is completely decentralised and non-custodial. We don’t store or have access to the user’s funds at any time. The user owns the private key and has full control over their funds.

How secure is Maiar?

Maiar protects your assets and data using cutting edge encryption and verification techniques to ensure they’re securely stored. In the event where your phone is lost or stolen, your private key (recovery phrase) can be safely used to recover your funds.

In this case, Maiar is non-custodial.

As there’s no accessible source code, this is not verifiable.

(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.