Slicing the Bitcoin Wallet Market
An overview of WalletScrutiny's findings so far
Due to a bug you might have to scroll down a LOT to find the main content.
With more than 4000 products listed, it’s time to extract some numbers.
The following is a breakdown of how many products fall into each verdict and meta-verdict:
| Meta / Verdict | ok | stale obsolete defunct discontinued |
Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| fewusers | 194 | 1229 | Once stale or obsolete, these products have little chance to ever make an impact in the Bitcoin ecosystem. We don’t look deeper into these. We started tracking them just in case. Only few were defunct when we first added them. |
| custodial | 671 | 310 | This is what the bulk of Bitcoiners use apparently. The most popular mobile Bitcoin “wallets” are custodial (or the rather similar no-send-receive). |
| wip | 202 | 639 | For some products we do archaeology and assign verdicts even after they are defunct but that’s rather low priority. 202 to go … for now. |
| nosource | 235 | 151 | Most of these are defending their closed-source-ness with prevention of fake copy apps. Either way, nobody can check if they are playing by the rules. |
| nowallet | 146 | 119 | Products that look like they might be wallets get looked into and we keep them around to not look into these again and again. Should we hide them somehow? |
| nobtc | 105 | 69 | We currently don’t analyze products that don’t also manage BTC. |
| nosendreceive | 84 | 30 | MercadoPago and PayPal have more than 100 million users each - and usually users cannot cash their bitcoins in or out to a self-custodial wallet. |
| vapor | 77 | 2 | Most of these are hardware products. |
| noita | 32 | 12 | “no interface to authorize a transaction” - No screen. No buttons. Mostly NFC tags that can sign transactions to avoid leaking the key but they sign whatever. |
| ftbfs | 19 | 22 | “failed to build from source” - these products share source but we failed to build them in the latest version. |
| unreleased | 34 | 6 | Mostly hardware products that were announced and maybe even do a pre-sale already but haven’t delivered yet. Once defunct, these are the “vapor ware”. |
| fake | 4 | 34 | Luckily most of these are available only for a short time after being classified as “fake” but some blatant fakes survive longer than others. |
| nonverifiable | 20 | 16 | These are self-custodial, share code and many are working on reproducibility. We track these closely. |
| diy | 18 | 13 | Mostly hardware products. When you do it yourself, it is on you to be transparent. |
| prefilled | 12 | 11 | Yep. These exist. And people use them. When funds move, it might have been the provider or the client. Both have plausible deniability. |
| plainkey | 13 | 7 | These are mostly NFC tags in varying form factors that surrender the private keys to a companion app to do whatever with them. |
| obfuscated | 8 | 9 | If we had more resources, we probably would find more products for this verdict. |
| reproducible | 9 | 2 | Few verdicts contain fewer products than this - most transparent - verdict. But there is a backlog of hardware wallet projects and later desktop wallets but the latter is a hard problem to solve. |
| sealed-plainkey | 6 | 3 | A verdict exclusive to bearer tokens. |
| sealed-noita | 3 | 0 | A verdict exclusive to bearer tokens and until some open source “secure element” comes around, the top verdict there. |
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