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ICONOMI: Buy and Sell Crypto

Latest release: 2.4.1 ( 24th October 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 26th October 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
4.6 ★★★★★
82 ratings
25th May 2017

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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.

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

It describes itself as a “Crypto Strategy Provider”

All your assets are safely stored with ICONOMI, so you don’t need to worry about keys, wallets, or other technical stuff.

The Site

Apart from being able to deposit fiat and cryptocurrencies, the site also provides “Crypto Strategies” Watch Video on Youtube

Cryptocurrency transfers are possible.

Withdrawal options and limits are also defined.

Iconomi has a full suite of legal documents which can be found in the Legal section of their site.

Terms and Conditions

Custodial cryptocurrency services are mostly compliant given the increasing regulatory approach by most countries towards cryptocurrencies.

Iconomi’s Terms and Conditions show that they are compliant:

ICONOMI LTD has been temporarily registered under the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017 as a crypto asset business until 31 March 2022, pending the determination of our application by the Financial Conduct Authority.

You can peruse the Iconomi End Users Terms and Conditions via this PDF file.

Furthermore, according to this document:

ICONOMI reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to terminate your access to the Website, the Platform, and its related Services or any portion thereof at any time, without notice, in particular due to legal grounds originating in anti-money laundering and know your client regulations and procedures, or any other relevant applicable regulations.

The App

We downloaded the app and registered. We needed to upgrade our verification to Tier 1 to make a deposit or withdrawal. Fiat money transfer is also possible depending on your jurisdicion. It is also possible to buy and sell bitcoin, but it also requires upgrading to Tier 1.

Verdict

This app provides a custodial service and therefore it 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.