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BitGlobal (ex: Bithumb Global)

Latest release: 2.6.5 ( 3rd April 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 11th September 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
2.5 ★★★★★
76 ratings
25th June 2019

Jump to verdict 

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing the risks of centralized custodians with BitGlobal (ex: Bithumb Global)  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)

It’s highly recommended to avoid this app.

Their subreddit is full of clients reporting that they cannot withdraw their coins!

The reviews were alarmingly negative.

Adeleke David Adekunle
★☆☆☆☆ 6 April 2021
Very terrible experience! Too expensive to use, and too cumbersome processes! It cost me just 1 TRX to move 108 TRX to your exchange to trade for a coin available only on bithumb. First disappointment is placing a minimum limit of 400 TRX to trade…why? That’s typically saying if I don’t have at least $40, I can’t trade on your exchange. To top up the bad experience, to withdraw my 108 TRX, you charged 33 TRX leaving me with only 75 TRX. This is the worst I’ve had. I’m deleting your app!

Dwayne Campbell
★☆☆☆☆ 13 July 2021
They are 100% an exit scam exchange. If you have a missing deposit just consider it lost. They have provided no updates for a deposit that was not credited for more than 3 months now. Check their Reddit to see the many complaints as well. Stay away from this exchange. Most of the positive reviews are paid reviews.

Paid reviews never look good for an app, wallet or otherwise. Noticeably three of the 5 star reviews begin with the exact same sentence.

Even the Twitter account seemed to be spammed with likes and comments from bots saying

Nice Project

Good Project

or variants thereof

This is all very fishy.

Verdict: Custodial and 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.