Bitcoin Forum

Hello bitcoiners !
I want use exodus wallet (exodus.io) because it seen have beautiful UX/UI
but the problem here is that is not open source and managed so i want to know how safe this wallet ??
plz give me your advise on this wallet by answering this question :
1. how safe this wallet ?
2. am i really in control of my bitcoins or other coins ?
3. is the privay keys stored in their server (because this wallet is managed) ?

Thanks

It’s closed source so we can’t assure it’s as safe as it should be. I personally wouldn’t use them or at least wouldn’t keep too much money in there. But they aren’t just an unknown random wallet, so I would say they are in the middle. Not the best option but also not a shit option.

Yes. You have access to the seed and private keys. However, exporting them isn’t as easy as other wallets because they want it to be as newbie-friendly as possible. And dealing with keys isn’t very newbie-friendly.


See: https://support.exodus.io/article/86-how-can-i-view-my-private-keys

No.

Exodus wallet is a software wallet where you store your coins on your computer. Exodus is offering 2 ways of recovering your wallets if the wallets are stolen or lost.

• The first is, they will give 12-word Passphrase when you create an account. You need to store that safely as a backup to recover your coins if the computer breaks and you are not able to access your cryptocurrency.

• The second is the email restore option. You will be sent an email with a backup link attached when you create an account. By clicking on this link, you can restore your account.

* But the above features do not protect your coins from hackers and malware.

Read here to know more - https://www.bitdegree.org/tutorials/exodus-wallet-review/#Exodus_Wallet_Review_Is_Exodus_Safe_to_Use


Yes, you will have control on your coins as the encrypted private key is stored on your computer. It will be accessible only to you.


No, it will be stored on your computer and you will have full control over it. It will not be stored in the cloud(server).

Read this article to know more - https://support.exodus.io/article/46-where-are-my-private-keys-stored


Note: Finally, it is up to you to choose the best wallet you want. Please do some research before creating any wallet.

Please don't make a beautiful design the reason why you would chose one wallet over another. That shouldn't be a priority. I have had no experience with Exodus but I would never consider using it because it looks good. Go for usability and proven safety of funds rather than looks.
A poisoned apple can also look good.

Exodus has higher fees compared to other wallets.

You have your private keys and your coins, and it is not stored in server.

If you are using it only for Bitcoin, it is best to switch to Electrum wallet.

As an alternative Coinomi is a nice wallet, that was once Open source.

Agreed only UX/UI designed probable depend not be safe predominantly developing lake coding app and site Insert something else easier tools script  All of these reasons can lead to many problems though make things a lot easier Better not use anything made by someone else.

Exodus's wallet was fairly good because it offered for beginners an easy way to receive coins/tokens but it became very bad for the following reasons:

 - Sync problems: Lots of non-sync problems especially if your country has conversion problems using ShapeShift.
 - High fees: ShapeShift use higher fees than average and the wallet tends to pay higher fees.
 - Weak Protection: Do not provide layers of wallet protection as any simple virus of your computer will put your money at risk.

Personally I stopped using them due to sync problems.

Well, I am been using Exodus wallet for more than two years now.
I don't keep many cryptos in them as I have cold storage (Ledger Nano S) for the long term and secure storage option.
It does work pretty well and I am quite happy with it.
I would suggest it but not for huge amount of funds.
It works well as a hot wallet.

May I ask that which "fee" you two are referring to? The OP wants to only store coins in the wallet, and sending coin fee ain't very much TBH. Yesterday, I used it for sending some BTC, and the transaction fee was only about ~0.00004 BTC (way less than a buck).

However, in the case of "exchanging" or "trading" your coins, Exodus charges about 2% to 4% of the total amount, which is quite a lot. Using the software only as a wallet (like in the case of OP) doesn't require any big fee. Moreover, Exodus only generates the profit through this "exchange" feature, and for all the work which they do (like lightning-fast support at Slack and frequent GUI/operational updates), I guess it's still pretty reasonable.

Probably because they don't allow to customize fees and if the mempool is even a little bit full, they will make you overpay a lot (and there is nothing you can do other than using a different wallet).

Correct. No way to adjust fee.
I used it before few times and it charges highest fees compared to any other wallet I used.

Honestly i don't see any thing wrong with exodus wallet since you are been given your private key or recovery seed when you opened the wallet,but if you are fine with the auto transaction fee which is not adjustable then no problem,just keep your private key safe

Couple of days before I read a thread on reddit which is about coinomi vs exodus and most of the people replied Coinomi is the best because people often faces lags while using exodus.

If OP you are only want to store bitcoin then go with electrum which is available on desktop as well as for android.

Exodus is one of the worst wallets available, together with jaxx.

Besides it being closed source which means you can't know what it is doing and how it is doing it, there is a severe vulnerability which allows anyone with access to your computer to extract the seed.
The developer refuse to fix it because 'your computer has to be secure in order to use a desktop wallet' - which is an extremely worrying statement from developers.

The seed is not secured at all. It is stored in plain text. It takes roughly 1 minute to extract it.
I'd recommend to use a better wallet (e.g. electrum), where an attacker can not simply extract the seed with 1 minute access to your computer (the wallet file can be stored encrypted, not accessible without the password).

Just like what bob123 said, the security of that wallet is worse compared to the alternatives. I'd definitely suggest something else, but if you really like the UI/UX of Exodus, definitely only hold a very small amount using it. Heck, I wouldn't hold more than $50.

As always, if you have a good chunk of money that you're going to hold, grab a reputable hardware wallet[1][2] if you're not knowledgeable enough to create an air-gapped device.

---

[1] https://ledger.com/
[2] https://trezor.io/

If you want to use Exodus only for Bitcoin, you can also use Electrum. As a beginner it's basically almost as easy to use as Exodus (and there are tons of guides about Electrum if you Google them or even their website explains everything very well: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/)

And if you gain more experience you can use all of the different settings for advanced users. But even the default settings are already much better than Exodus.

Exodus is only a reasonable choice if you want to move some random shitcoins from an exchange to your own wallet. The number of supported shitcoins is very high and it's better to store them in Exodus than on random shitcoin exchanges. I'm using it for small amounts of ETH and never had problems, but make sure to avoid storing high amounts in Exodus, even if they are shitcoins.

which multi-wallet would you suggest then? I have been using exodus for two years now kinda passively, and did not have any issues except for those high fees.

For BTC, I recommend that you use a BTC-only wallet like Electrum. For other coins which have no issues with high fees, you can keep using Exodus. The other wallet which supports a lot of coins and seems good (I still didn't use it tho) is Guarda (https://guarda.co/coins). It's non-custodial so I would call it a possible option.

Might as well consider HW wallet like Ledger or Trezor that supports a lot of tokens/coins.

How about Coinomi?  I used to use that wallet on my smartphone and I just recently downloaded it for my PC, even though I don't have a lot of altcoins.  As far as I know it's secure--I never had issues on my phone and don't expect to on my computer, nor have I heard about any security problems with Coinomi. 

I tried Exodus some months back and was not impressed at all.  It was ugly and I just didn't like it and I uninstalled it shortly after trying it.

If OP is willing to spend some money, this is what I'd recommend as well.  I never used a Trezor, but I really like my Ledger.  A lot, actually.  It's a device I keep fiddling with like it was a phone, and I even bought a little case for it.  The Trezor is just as secure, but I don't like its aesthetics, it's look.  I'm finicky like that.

Coinomi was a good wallet before its PC version was said to have vulnerability issue and I won't suggest the use of it
@karsyla, the best option you have is using electrum Segwit wallet version for transaction or getting a $59 Ledger hardware wallet which accept various coin and I will advise you to use two-factor authentication for your exodus

There were security issues with the Coinomi wallet in the past. If I am correct the issue is present only in the desktop version, not in the mobile applications.
The desktop client spellchecks your seed words via Google. One user claimed he used a lot of money this way.

Take a look at these threads:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5114708.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5114778.0

I'm not much a tech person. But the last time I checked open-source of a project doesn't mean the project is totally secure but for public review and this project was created last year. Don't you think its too early to recommend such wallet to people?

I doubt anyone is creating wallets from scratch anymore, especially with all the existing open-source projects out there, meaning that whatever code has been used on this, it might have been used and reviewed elsewhere as well.

Also, how insecure/vulnerable can the wallet be? knowing that unlike Coinomi, the suggested wallet stores everything locally and don't send anything to their servers.

Thank you for your answers guys!

Most of you recommend HW wallet which I completely agree with. I already have one - Ledger Nano S. The thing is, to me ledger is so inconvenient to use it's crazy. It's alright to hold assets, but if you transact a lot and different currencies it's not that comfortable at all - it does not even have enough space for crypto apps to download to ledger.

Now exodus is not completely open-source, while the team claims that most of it is open-source it's just the interface that is kept private for trying to prevent others from copying it, which is alright we don't care about the design code, do we? Now, let's say exodus program collapses on my desktop - how can I retrieve the coins?

Exodus falls back under this category, does it not?

If you mean the closed-source wallet category, then yes. Exodus isn’t open source.

No, I mean that you have full control over you coins, because the keys are generated from a seed and is stored on your device

You do. I say this in the first post of this thread...

As explained above, Exodus supports exporting of keys... but it also provides a BIP39 compatible seed mnemonic (aka "Recovery Phrase"). I've never been able to test it, because Exodus refuses to let you actually access the backup "recovery phrase" (and therefore test the backup) until you have deposited coins into the wallet. ::)

So, as long as you have the 12 word "recovery phrase"... you can restore your wallet to another BIP39 compatible wallet should Exodus no longer work.

Hey there, this is Kris from Exodus. Happy to help answer any questions regarding the wallet and the earlier posters are correct. We are not 100% open source so if that's the #1 concern for a wallet then Exodus is not the best choice for your needs.

Regarding the display of the backup phrase, we've recently changed this to where you can backup the wallet before you have funds in it. This applies to Desktop and Mobile. This will make testing your seed phrase easier. I can go into the history of why we used to do it differently but I imagine the most important question has been answered. Did that help in any way?

In a word... Yes.

That was basically one of the core reasons why I would not recommend Exodus to anyone. I'd be more inclined to recommend it now... Are users able to specify fees now as well? Or is that all still handled automagically based on network conditions? ???

No. Apparently they still decide that for you. However, I made the backup of a wallet I just generated (without having to send any coins) and it works on Electrum with the BIP39 seed option. So you can use it to hold your other coins with cool UI, and use Electrum for BTC payments.

wow, that's nice, did not know that before. I thought those mnemonic phrases are unique to that specific wallet, but this is not the case right?

If I have bitcoin on exodus, I can use the mnemonic phrase on electrum and electrum will retrieve that amount of BTC?

Essentially that is correct... but you need to be aware that Electrum is somewhat of a "special" case... Electrum, by default, is NOT BIP39 compatible... While it uses the BIP39 wordlist to generate it's seed mnemonics, they are NOT BIP39 compatible.

However, Electrum can *import* a BIP39 seed... on the seed entry screen, you click "Options" button:
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/15/z5Tra.png


You then select the "BIP39 Seed" option:
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/15/z5tOo.png


And make sure that you read the warning:
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/15/z5FCT.png


Note also that Electrum will NOT store a BIP39 seed in the wallet file (unlike a native Electrum seed), so you cannot recover a BIP39 seed from a restored BIP39 wallet file ("Wallet -> Seed" option will be greyed out).

alright, has there appeared better alternatives to Exodus? Because I cannot really find anything better than this one :)

You have Atomicwallet. it supports over 300 cryptos and It's not that much different from Exodus, especially when it comes to UI. There has been a serious accusation  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5049346.0)against them being linked to other scam companies in the past, but aside from that, I haven't seen many users complaining about it.

Or there is also Coinomi, but I would only consider it as a better alternative for the mobile version because even though they do have a desktop wallet, it's not as good as Exodus.

Define "better"? ??? What are your specific requirements for a wallet, such that you would consider using it an alternative?

Open Source?
Custom fee adjustment?
Multi-currency required?
Fancy UI?
Desktop/Mobile?

Without knowing what you actually want, it's difficult to recommend anything.