Bitcoin wallet providers haven’t focused on increasing privacy to promote consumer financial independence and safety over the last year, according to the Open Bitcoin Privacy Project’s (OBPP) second edition survey.
As no provider received a score of more than 50 out of 100, the OBPP suggests privacy work has stagnated within the bitcoin wallet industry and that improvements to these services are greatly needed.
While new bitcoin wallet providers have begun adopting hierarchical deterministic (HD) architecture for advanced security, the OBPP contends that many privacy advances from 2014, including Tor support and stealth addresses, were not incorporated by wallet providers in 2015.
The project wrote in its latest analysis: "Wallets seem to be mostly in a holding pattern, waiting for their competitors to take the lead on innovating." Ranvier told CoinDesk that OBPP’s criteria is designed to "leave room for improvement", but that he believes the low scores are a reflection of bitcoin wallet providers and their sometimes slow efforts to address privacy bugs and leaks.
Since the first edition of the report, OBPP has increased the number of criteria it looks at when ranking wallets from 38 to 68 and doubled the number of wallets it reviewed from 10 to 20.
The report is a follow up to its first survey, released in May 2015 with the aim of improving financial privacy within the bitcoin ecosystem. Contributors to the open-source effort include Blockchain security engineer Kristov Atlas and Stash Crypto software designer Justus Ranvier. Top performers
Bitcoin hardware wallet provider Ledger took the top spot for most privacy-attentive wallet, scoring a 50 out of 100.
The company got high marks for having a variety of smartcard-based hardware wallets, including Ledger Nano. The USB stick wallet stores user’s private keys and when inserted into a computer and validated with a PIN allows users to […]
