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BRD Bitcoin Wallet Bitcoin BTC

Google Play App Store Website
Developer
breadwallet (Android)
breadwallet LLC (iPhone)
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Released
Android: 21st July 2016
iPhone: 22nd June 2014
Source code
Public on github
Custody
Self-custodial: The user holds the keys
Status
Android: No longer available for download. No source code available.
iPhone: The provider went out of business and the product cannot be used anymore. No source code available.

Passed 5 of 7 tests

We check each wallet from its code to the app on your device, asking these questions in order:
We stopped asking questions after we encountered a failed answer.

Is this product the original?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Fake" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Fake".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Fake" and the following would apply:

The bigger wallets often get imitated by scammers that abuse the reputation of the product by imitating its name, logo or both.

Imitating a competitor is a huge red flag and we urge you to not put any money into this product!

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.
Is it a wallet?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Not a wallet" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Not a wallet".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Not a wallet" and the following would apply:

If it’s called “wallet” but is actually only a portfolio tracker, we don’t look any deeper, assuming it is not meant to control funds. What has no funds, can’t lose your coins. It might still leak your financial history!

If you can buy Bitcoins with this app but only into another wallet, it’s not a wallet itself.

The same goes for off-ramps that hold no balance at all: bitcoin (or gift cards) go in and fiat goes straight out to your bank. An off-ramp that keeps your fiat until you cash out is a wallet, just not for Bitcoin. One that keeps a bitcoin balance you can’t send out is ‘Can’t send or receive bitcoins’.

Is it for bitcoins?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "A wallet but not for Bitcoin" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "A wallet but not for Bitcoin".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "A wallet but not for Bitcoin" and the following would apply:

At this point we only look into wallets that at least also support BTC.

A product that can send and receive other coins but only tracks Bitcoin addresses read-only is a wallet, just not for Bitcoin, so it gets this verdict. ‘Not a wallet’ is for products that hold no coins at all, such as pure portfolio trackers.

The same goes for off-ramps that credit your bitcoin to a fiat balance you later cash out: the app holds your money, but not as bitcoin.

Can it send and receive bitcoins?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Can't send or receive bitcoins" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Can't send or receive bitcoins".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Can't send or receive bitcoins" and the following would apply:

If it is for holding BTC but you can’t actually send or receive them with this product then it doesn’t function like a wallet for BTC but you might still be using it to hold your bitcoins with the intention to convert back to fiat when you “cash out”.

All products in this category are custodial and thus funds are at the mercy of the provider.

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.
Does the product allow self-custody?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys" and the following would apply:

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.

Balances on operator-dependent layers (Spark, Ark and similar) are judged by one question: “Can a user, with only what the app gives them and expecting help from nobody, actually force their money onto the Bitcoin blockchain?” Such a balance counts as self-custodial only for the part that the app itself shows the user could recover this way, calculated without network access at a fee rate the user chooses, and only once a recovery from that app has been demonstrated, because the app decides how the balance is split and therefore how much of it can come back. The rest of the balance is considered custodial.

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.
Is the source code publicly available?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "No source for current release found" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "No source for current release found".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "No source for current release found" and the following would apply:

A wallet that claims to not give the provider the means to steal the users’ funds might actually be lying. In the spirit of “Don’t trust - verify!” you don’t want to take the provider at his word, but trust that people hunting for fame and bug bounties could actually find flaws and back-doors in the wallet so the provider doesn’t dare to put these in.

Back-doors and flaws are frequently found in closed source products but some remain hidden for years. And even in open source security software there might be catastrophic flaws undiscovered for years.

An evil wallet provider would certainly prefer not to publish the code, as hiding it makes audits orders of magnitude harder.

For your security, you thus want the code to be available for review.

If the wallet provider doesn’t share up to date code, our analysis stops there as the wallet could steal your funds at any time, and there is no protection except the provider’s word.

“Up to date” strictly means that any instance of the product being updated without the source code being updated counts as closed source. This puts the burden on the provider to always first release the source code before releasing the product’s update. This paragraph is a clarification to our rules following a little poll.

We are not concerned about the license as long as it allows us to perform our analysis. For a security audit, it is not necessary that the provider allows others to use their code for a competing wallet. You should still prefer actual open source licenses as a competing wallet won’t use the code without giving it careful scrutiny.

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.
Is the decompiled binary legible?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Obfuscated" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Obfuscated".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer were "no", we would mark it as "Obfuscated" and the following would apply:

When compiling source code to binary, usually a lot of meta information is retained. A variable storing a masterseed would usually still be called masterseed, so an auditor could inspect what happens to the masterseed. Does it get sent to some server? But obfuscation would rename it for example to _t12, making it harder to find what the product is doing with the masterseed.

In benign cases, code symbols are replaced by short strings to make the binary smaller but for the sake of transparency this should not be done for non-reproducible Bitcoin wallets. (Reproducible wallets could obfuscate the binary for size improvements as the reproducibility would assure the link between code and binary.)

Especially in the public source cases, obfuscation is a red flag. If the code is public, why obfuscate it?

As obfuscation is such a red flag when looking for transparency, we do also sometimes inspect the binaries of closed source apps.

As looking for code obfuscation is a more involved task, we do not inspect many apps but if we see other red flags, we might test this to then put the product into this red-flag category.

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.

Distribution

Google Play Website

Build Verifications

Check your file

Drop the file you downloaded or installed to see if anybody verified it. Its SHA-256 is calculated in your browser.

or drop it here

Platform notes

On the Google Play Store, there are many apps that have Bitcoin in their name or description but don’t allow the user to use Bitcoin or they don’t look like Bitcoin wallets but turn out to be. We run our tests and document our findings.

Update 2026-10-30: BRD is gone. In March 2022 the provider asked users to move their funds to Coinbase Wallet, the website stopped loading in 2023, and brd.com is now a domain for sale. The Android app is gone from Google Play. The iPhone app is still listed, but it was last updated in March 2022 and the BRD servers it relies on no longer work.

Android

Update 2022-11-02: The repository has not been updated in a long time and the provider has not reacted to our enquiry to do so. This product is not verifiable.

Update 2022-04-07: This product’s provider appears to be partnering with Coinbase and with their latest update they now encourage and help their users to migrate to Coinbase Wallet, a browser extension based self-custodial wallet. The article is not (yet) talking about BRD Bitcoin Wallet Bitcoin BTC being in sunset mode or obsolete but some consolidation appears to be going on.

Update 2021-06-29: The provider informed us that the latest code can be found in a new repository. Apparently the new repository is a fork of the old repository where they changed the license from open source to some look-dont-touch license. For us, both provide the same degree of transparency so we have to revert the last change in verdict. This app does indeed share up to date source code although the git tag and the Play Store version name do differ.

Update 2021-06-27: As pointed out here, the provider stopped updating the public source repository and thus is to be considered closed source. The current version on the Play Store is 4.10.0 from yesterday. The latest version available on their GitHub is 4.9.1.1 from 2021-03-03.

This wallet claims not to be custodial and we found its supposed source code but we found no claim of verifiability and so verification was difficult.

Update: The team reacted quickly to our reach-out after our first analysis via this issue on their GitHub.

Now we find a tag build-3.14.3.3 and can try to compile that:

$ git tag | grep 3.14.3
build-3.14.3.3
$ git checkout build-3.14.3.3
...
HEAD is now at a332b4d5 Merge branch 'pablobu/DROID-1497' into 'release/3.14.3'
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ docker run -v $PWD:/mnt -it beevelop/cordova bash
root@e34a31867b99:/tmp# cd /mnt/
root@e34a31867b99:/mnt# yes | $ANDROID_HOME/tools/bin/sdkmanager "platforms;android-28"
root@e34a31867b99:/mnt# ./gradlew :app:assemble
root@e34a31867b99:/mnt# ls app/build/outputs/apk/brd/release/*.apk
brd-release-3.14.2.1.apk  output.json

Now that doesn’t look promising, given we need version 3.14.3 and indeed the diff is huge and goes across many code files.

The content of AboutActivity for example confirms its the wrong version. Many of the differences look harmless like this:

diff -r fromBuild/smali/com/breadwallet/presenter/activities/settings/AboutActivity.smali fromPlayStore/smali/com/breadwallet/presenter/activities/settings/AboutActivity.smali
157c157
<     const-string v4, "3.14.2"
---
>     const-string v4, "3.14.3"

But with these diffs we can’t give it a pass:

Binary files fromBuild/lib/arm64-v8a/libcore.so and fromPlayStore/lib/arm64-v8a/libcore.so differ
Binary files fromBuild/lib/armeabi-v7a/libcore.so and fromPlayStore/lib/armeabi-v7a/libcore.so differ
Binary files fromBuild/lib/x86/libcore.so and fromPlayStore/lib/x86/libcore.so differ
Binary files fromBuild/lib/x86_64/libcore.so and fromPlayStore/lib/x86_64/libcore.so differ

Diffoscope yields user directories in its 397662 lines of diff:

│ ├── readelf --wide --decompress --hex-dump=.rodata {}
│ │ @@ -1,7610 +1,7450 @@
│ │  
│ │  Hex dump of section '.rodata':
│ │ -  0x001622e0 2f557365 72732f61 6a762f64 6576656c /Users/ajv/devel
│ │ -  0x001622f0 2f627265 61647761 6c6c6574 2d616e64 /breadwallet-and
│ │ -  0x00162300 726f6964 2f636f72 652f4a61 76612f43 roid/core/Java/C
│ │ -  0x00162310 6f72652f 7372632f 6d61696e 2f637070 ore/src/main/cpp
│ │ -  0x00162320 2f636f72 652f7375 70706f72 742f4252 /core/support/BR

This looks like NDK being the culprit for part of the diff, apart from it being the wrong version. Hopefully with Docker this can be improved.

Our verdict

We conclude that we hope for a quick resolution of the issues but for now this wallet remains not verifiable.

An issue has been opened at https://github.com/breadwallet/brd-mobile/issues/13

iPhone

The Android analysis above applies to the iPhone app too.

An issue has been opened at https://github.com/breadwallet/brd-mobile/issues/13

Product page updated by Leo Wandersleb

Community Opinions

These comments are contributed by Nostr users.

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Do your own research

In addition to reading our analysis, it is important to do your own checks. Before transferring any bitcoin to your wallet, look up reviews for the wallet you want to use. They should be easy to find. If they aren't, that itself is a reason to be extra careful.

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