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Genesis Vision

Latest release: 2.3.0 ( 17th March 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 1st October 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
4.8 ★★★★★
145 ratings
23rd April 2018

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Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing the risks of centralized custodians with Genesis Vision  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)

Google Play Description

Genesis Vision appears to be a trading and investment platform. From the Play Store description:

Genesis Vision created an ecosystem, where skilled asset managers compete on an open market in delivering profits to their investors. Asset managers can trade both conventional and crypto assets; thus Genesis Vision investors have a choice of which market they want their funds to be traded on.

The App

As expected from an exchange, user registration is mandatory. You are also advised to enable two factor authentication upon signing up and logging in.

If a user wants to add funds from an external address, they are provided with the BTC wallet’s QR code and address. Users who want to withdraw BTC must enter a withdrawal address.

From the Privacy Policy:

To comply the DIRECTIVE 2005/60/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 26 October 2005 and Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010 we use your data in KYC (Know your customer) Scoring Processing, in which we need to obtain reasonably complete information about you for conducting financial transactions in order to prevent money laundering, financing of terrorism and tax evasion. The next data we use in KYC process: identity document information, residence address certifying document information, your economic profile (information on annual income, net profit, expected annual amount of investment, sources of funds), your conformity assessment (education, employment status, trading experience), number of your payment wallet).

Terms

In its Terms, section 3.2::

3.2. You agree that GV may, in its sole discretion and without prior notice, suspend or terminate the provision of any Services or access to the Website (or its functions) to You personally or all Users.

Other Media

In a Medium blog post, it is mentioned that they plan on creating a non-custodial version of their existing trading platform.

Future Plans The release of Genesis Vision platform’s DeFi version is right around the corner and we wanted to share some more details on what we’re getting into. The first version of our non-custodial model of Genesis Vision consists of two parts: Decentralized asset management platform based on Ethereum blockchain. Decentralized platform based on XDAI blockchain.

Verdict

Despite having available source-code, backing up the private key is not readily apparent. Moreover, it mentions in its Privacy Policy that the company has the ability to backup and recover the personal data of users.

We reached out to Genesis vision via twitter to clarify.

We’ll tentatively label this app as 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.