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Zipmex: Buy Bitcoin & Crypto

Latest release: 22.6.2 ( 29th June 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 15th September 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
4.2 ★★★★★
125 ratings
6th November 2019

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Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing the risks of centralized custodians with Zipmex: Buy 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)

External Custodian

According to public information from this provider, they use an external company such as BitGo, Gemini Custody or Coinbase Custody as their custodian. Many of the products listed here do the same.

While this might be a good thing:

  • External Custodians are usually highly specialized in securing assets
  • External Custodians will care about fixing issues with one client, to not lose others
  • External Custodians are usually registered businesses under regulatory oversight
  • External Custodians will try to protect your funds even from your wallet provider: With fraud detection, they will certainly try to avoid the emptying of all users' wallets at once
it also has its down-sides:
  • External Custodians are extra intermediaries: Even when the wallet provider wants to let you use your money, they might turn out to be uncooperative
  • External Custodians holding custody of many wallets are interesting targets for hackers and thieves
  • External Custodians, being publicly registered will not be able to resist if in their jurisdiction rules on the use of Bitcoin get tightened

As External Custodians usually don't publish lists of companies they are working with and past information might be outdated, we have no way of assuring claims by wallet providers to be using their custody solution. Please let us know if you found proof that the provider is being dishonest about their business relation to External Custodians!

Zipmex is a “digital assets exchange” and claims that all assets are safely and securely stored with BitGo.

With this quote from the Play Store:

Zipmex is one of only a few exchanges to be licensed by Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission, approved by Indonesia’s commodity futures trading regulator BAPPEBTI and is also registered with the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC).

Zipmex is strongly hinting towards a custodial nature.

In the official website, Zipmex has an article on private/public keys:

Remembering public and private keys is always a hassle for any individual. However, if you have an account with Zipmex, you will not have to worry about forgetting your public key or losing your private key.
Public keys are fixed on the Zipmex wallet, so users can just login to their Zipmex accounts and go over to the wallet page to check out their public keys. Users do not need to unlock their wallet using a private key on Zipmex. Once you have logged in to your account, you’ll be able to access to your wallet which reduce the risk of losing or misremembering private keys.
Zipmex’s wallet is secured by BitGo, which is essentially the ‘gold standard’ of the digital assets storage. BitGo provides institutional-grade security, high compliance, and liquidity for your digital currency—$100 (USD) million theft insurance too.

In the case of this product, the provider is in charge of the keys. 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.
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.