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Mixin Messenger

Latest release: 0.36.1 ( 24th June 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 17th November 2021 . Failed to build from source provided!
4.8 ★★★★★
302 ratings
20th January 2018

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Please help us spread the word discussing build reproducibility with Mixin Messenger  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)

Update 2021-11-17: Although the source code is public, Emanuel failed to compile it from the source with the instructions provided. See the issue.

From the Play Store description:

Mixin Messenger is an open-source cryptocurrency wallet and signal protocol messenger, which supports almost all popular cryptocurrencies.

It supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, Monero and thousands of other cryptocurrencies.

Also relevant:

Mixin Messenger is built on Mixin Network, it’s a PoS second layer solution for other blockchains. Mixin Network is a distributed second layer ledger, so you own your crypto assets. Because of this second layer, it’s normal that you can’t check your BTC address balance on a Bitcoin blockchain explorer.

More information about how its wallet functions can be found on this Zendesk article “Guides for Wallet”

We emailed the Mixin development team on September 16, 2021, to verify whether they have custody of the private keys. We await their response.

The repository is linked in the description.

It appears that this wallet is non-custodial and that source-code is available.

An issue has been made on Gitlab with the corresponding results.

Issue has been raised in MixinNetwork’s Github Issues page.

(dg, em, lw)

Verdict Explained

We encountered a build error while compiling from source code!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Build Error!

Can the product be built from the source provided?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Failed to build from source provided!".

Published code doesn’t help much if the app fails to compile.

We try to compile the published source code using the published build instructions into a binary. If that fails, we might try to work around issues but if we consistently fail to build the app, we give it this verdict and open an issue in the issue tracker of the provider to hopefully verify their app later.

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.