Bitcoin Forum

Crypto exchanges make their money from withdrawals and trading fee that's why some have high withdrawal fee and some are so damn affordable but what about crypto wallets? How are they making money?

I mean it's damn hard to build a crypto wallet that's secured but where is the money coming from?

You have different types of wallets:

Open source wallets: Most of them are not profitable, and they don't really need to since anyone can contribute to the code and they have no developers to pay.  

Closed source wallets: like Atomicwallet, Exodus, Trustwallet, etc. have partnerships with instant exchanges like Shapeshift, changenow, changelly, etc. and AFAIK, each time someone uses the built-in exchange, they earn a commission.

Hardware wallets (open and closed source alike): They earn money by selling you the device, and some of them also have partnerships with exchanges.

When you've got a lot of users, like thousands to hundred thousand and from millions. Even with less commission from the integrated exchanges they've got, that's still big money when all are consolidated. Aside from those that have been said, although this isn't a major source they're also leaving a donation address where anyone who thinks that it's been a big help to them, can just leave any amount of tip there.
Those that are into open-source wallet development, they're just also generous developers that want to give help and contribute to the community.

In addiction, not all crypto wallets are noncustodial, some are custodial wallets with withdrawal fee too as they charge extra fee in addiction to transaction (miner) fee.

Closed-source wallets may charge a fee every time a customer makes a transaction, and this fee is so small that it goes unnoticed. Depending on the number of users of such a wallet and their overall activity, the revenue may fluctuate significantly. Moreover, given that users or other developers cannot inspect the codebase of a closed-source wallet, it enables wallet creators to conduct malicious activities that also go unnoticed; for example, they are collecting and selling user data with information about senders and receivers, their balances, and their location. In other words, in the case of closed-source "free" wallets, you are seen as a product, and you are sold as a product. On the other hand, the business model of open-source software is pretty straightforward and transparent: in most cases, it simply doesn't exist because all contributions to the codebase are absolutely voluntary. Some wallets, especially those providing CoinJoin and other mixing services, may collect a fee for facilitating transaction obfuscation, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

This is very possible, but it is a noncustodial wallet, every address the coin is sent in a transaction will be revealed on the blockchain, if a close source wallet has that malicious means of deducting extra fee than the transaction fee, it will apprear on the blockchain.

But close source wallets are not recommended because its code is not available to the public to review, it could contain vulnerabilities that are intentional from the developers.

The cryptocurrency wallets don't make money from fees meant for miners.
Some wallets operate free as it's just a medium to see how much cryptocurrency we've got on the block chain ledger and they provide keys that enable users to access their coins in the ledger.
That's why with your key you can redeem coin in any wallet. Since we all are marketers one way or the other, an app that generates huge traffic or has lots of users will definitely venture into affiliate marketing and make some profits. Some wallets get commission for swapping coins through shapeshift and other do get commission for referring users to buy a particular hardware wallet.

https://hackernoon.com/the-business-model-of-crypto-wallets-89aeed8322dc

Additional fees would just go straight to the miners, extra output for their hidden fee will stick out like a sore thumb as Charles-Tim mentioned.
Plus it wouldn't be practical since small amounts can be troublesome to consolidate.

You're probably thinking of "custodial wallets" which is similar to what OP already pointed out.

Aside from fees maybe like from token shares. Like trustwallet they airdropped their tokens for free on some referrals. It works like an exchange that when user invites a lot, there are other who will use the app as well and this will increase their user base. Im not sure if there is really an additional fee aside from the on chain transaction being imposed here cause we can see the transaction and confirm in the explorer, I dont see any ads too when using it so it will be coming from trading fees ans transaction fees.

Still most of the crypto wallets has its own exchange where one can do trading or exchange. Crypto wallet is for free to attract its user to use its platform but in the end when moving to another wallet or do trading, fees will apply.

Be careful with other crypto wallet that offer for free. Some of them has controlled over to it and that you should do research before putting coins in that certain wallet. I think there are good crypto wallets that has already establish and many users comfortable using it. There are recommendations in here and that you can read. There are a lot good crypto wallet.

I used Mycelium crypto wallet with trading and exchange. This is not a paid post but base on my experience and with the use of the crypto wallet. I am completely comfortable to use this crypto wallet.

But take note for popular open source software, it's possible certain company hire someone to make contribution or make donation to existing contributor. BitMEX wrote good article about it at https://blog.bitmex.com/who-funds-bitcoin-development/ (https://blog.bitmex.com/who-funds-bitcoin-development/).

And few open source wallet such as Mycelium put some ads on their application.

They have a lot of users.
What do you think if a new Blockchain comes out and become a popular Blockchain so suppose trust wallet will list without any contract.
The wallets make a deal with the Blockchains and than they add the Blockchain with money or they deal with something else.
Note: (This is my point of view others may disagree)

It is not limited to the developers of certain types of wallets, in fact there are many volunteer contributors to the development of bitcoins for several fields that perhaps their only income (from users) is in the form of donations. I just remembered about this site in my bookmarks, https://bitcoindevlist.com

You are thinking either of multi-currency wallets or custodial clients. And those exchange features that are supported by such wallets, aren't usually natively developed by them. It's part of a partnership with a 3rd-party. The two most popular bitcoin wallets, Bitcoin Core and Electrum don't have internal exchanges, for example.

It's interesting that Electrum doesn't even have a donation address. Not one that I am familiar with at least. The wallet's developer, ThomasV suggested a long time ago they don't request donations, and suggested to donate to those operating Electrum servers instead.


On the other hand, Bitcoin Core's donation address (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/3E8ociqZa9mZUSwGdSmAEMAoAxBK3FNDcd) has received over 13 BTC in donations in the last 2 years alone in over 1000 transactions.

Electrum is my favorite light client, so I went looking for a donation address a couple years ago and also came up empty.  I can only assume that the development team is working pro-bono, or they've received a significant donation from a sponsor.  Electrum is so well maintained and releases are so regular that it seems unlikely that the dev team isn't being compensated.

They probably are and switch their donation addresses frequently. The support that can be given by a community are not to be underestimated, for example, the times I have opened the Monero wallet "Feather" I notice it is a section for people to donate to Monero-related projects and the maintenance of the wallet itself.

The monero community itself fund the development of their wallets and they even crowdfund artwork to bring awareness about the project. "Monero-chan" is their mascot.

It is not all the Crypto exchanges that charge transaction fees, some of them did their trading without charging any fees from the traders. Like the experience I had from Ramitano and finance. If I sent 0.002 or 0.005 from wallet to binance for exchange, I only pay a transaction fees from my wallet while the exchange platform (binance)didn't charge me anything. So I don't know where they are getting their profit and pay workers. For the wallet, they charged fees base the blocks(nods) at the moment. Example:
https://i.imgur.com/8EX3Vc5.jpeg
This is how wallet get their money from mining.

You want an exchange to charge fee for deposit? Is their any exchange that charge for deposting coin? I have not used such an exchange before.

Binance get money from many means like trading fee, withdrawal fee (which is far more than the actually transaction fee), ads display for p2p, IEO  and few other ways.

No. Noncustodial wallet do not charged from the transaction fee, the transaction fee is an incentive received by only miners, not wallet developers. You need to read what others people posted before you, like what OmegaStarScream and ETFbitcoin posted. Example, that is Electrum wallet, the fee belongs to miners, not Electrum developers.

Asked Coinomi devs once, they said - devs who want to integrate their coin into their wallet pay them fee.

For such wallets, in start you have to use your funds to make it popular in first place.

That's because you are depositing to Binance, and there are no deposit fees on that exchange. If you make a trade with those coins, Binance will charge you trading fees. If you withdraw them, they will charge you withdrawal fees.

You are forgetting one very important way to make money for exchanges: listing fees for altcoins and shitcoins. Those aren't cheap. It's the dream of every altcoin developer to get listed on Binance because they know the amount of traffic and trading activity that takes place on that exchange. Unless the coin has strong fundamentals (many don't), where Binance sees it as an advantage to add support for it on their platform, they will negotiate with the devs and charge them a hefty listing fee.

Also, some exchanges continue developing their service and features due to the fact they wanted their coins to be used on their exchanges. So that it will continue to be liquidated and its price will also increase. Also, they're getting partnerships with other exchanges as well, to continue to promote their products, and with that, they will have no problem earning money. For example Okex, Binance, and others that are like them.