Topic: What's in for crypto wallet companies? (Read 319 times)

Yeah you are right. There are some wallets which do provide advertising especially on mobile apps.
For instance the open source wallet Mycelium has this kind of advertising. Obviously this generates revenue to the developers.

It's like showing some banners or connecting it to google adsense (if it's a website). I don't know if google adsense is available for those desktop wallets where they can be placed at the top of the interface of that wallet.
But most likely, it's like having those advertisements that has come from their inquiry. I can't really remember if I've used and saw one that has it on its own platform.

How is your last point valid? Can you use a crypto wallet that shows ads when you launch and try to make some transactions?

Adding to this

4. Some wallets get their revenue from the number of downloads on Playstore/Appstore
5. Some wallets have advertisements and gain ad revenue from them

I learnt a lot reading peoples comment in this section of mine, thank you all for all the contributions but there are some wallets that have insanely high fee more than the others and they are always centralised wallets like Coinbase for examples and yet people are still using this wallet.

Unfortunate truth indeed. I thought otherwise in the past, until when I started running websites/businesses. Anyone that tried running a website or online service would immediately realize how tremendously important data is.

There are different types of wallets are there so they are making money in different ways which probably varies with one from another. Lets take coinbase wallet which is custodial so they charge fee from you which is always higher than the actual fee needed and also they batch the transactions means they save lot of funds and only spend less from what they have collected.

Next multi crypto wallet as others said they may charge gee before the integration of a new coin and also they take commission while swapping one from another.

I wouldn't go as far to say that "all" open source software is following that philosophy.

Not always, but at least there are some people out there that want to contribute to what they consider a worthy project. I mean, if we take Satoshi no matter his background he didn't exploit Bitcoin to better his career or status. They just made something they thought the world needed. So, we do know that there are people out there that aren't always looking to benefit from it directly.

Sadly, capitalism does encourage what you've said, and therefore the majority are doing it to better themselves in one way or another.

Profit is not always related to the money obtained directly, but indirectly, good reputation, fame, adding work to your CV, helping others are all things that bring you money indirectly, and therefore all open-source, self-hosted wallets are based on such a philosophy.

A large part of the free wallets collects data and sells it to companies, governments, tracking sites, etc. This assumption includes all free self-hosted services including block explorers, tracking sites, multi-currency wallets.

Many developers are people who have previously invested in this project, and therefore its success means profits for them.

Not just really valuable, but probably one of the things most companies are looking for these days. Most of it is for advertising purposes, and the more up to date information they have on people, the better marketing strategies they have, which will directly correlate with how successful their business is. So, I would argue that data is probably the most valuable thing a company can have, not just valuable.

I hate to admit it, but collecting data from a company stand point is probably vital to their success. Although, I'm definitely not saying I like the fact we've gone down this road, and personally I'd like to see less privacy invasive data collection, but honestly I think we're past that point.

Don't mixed clone projects with the ones that really introduce something new to the public, there are thousands of shitcoins out there with a copycat whitepaper and copied utilities, not all developers are real developers, most are just into money rush, short term business and close down.

I once asked same question to Coinomi mod, they replied, there is fee for new coin integrations plus when you use their wallet's inbuilt swap features they get commission.

Most new wallets don't get much when they start but once you are established in market, making money becomes possible.

In some cases depending on how the company does it and how invasive the data hogging is, collecting data may be enough. Take note that for some businesses data is literally their mane revenue source; and take note that we're talking about finance and investing here — data can be really really valuable.

Not all crypto projects are created to solve real issues in our society. Most of them are created by following a trend in crypto market. They are clone projects that are created from source code of leading projects in each trend.

Developers can earn money from premined coins that can be publicly presented in White Paper, on website, etc. or be hidden for shady intention. They can earn money from allocated tokens so it is why you have to check tokenomics carefully. Pay attention on vesting period of developer tokens and check top holder wallets to make sure there are less risk of token on the market in early weeks or months.

Developers can also earn money from selling their tokens in ICO, IDO, IEO, whatever derivative of such for a common purpose of fund-raising.

in today case like happen with token not coin usually dev wallet remain untouched till the unlock date is completed even after completed they still need a vesting for amount period of time ~ Lock from 1-5 Year and linear vesting for 1-3 Year
the purpose of this to ensure that dev wont run away from project even tho there is lot rugged project and abandoned 

most cases developer using InitialCoinOffering(ICO) money to continue development of their coin and for exchange listing fee airdrop and bounty they using marketing wallet that usually remain unlock with coordination with community

I don't know of any cases, although that doesn't mean they don't, and to be honest I would be surprised if they didn't. Since, a lot of companies out there unrelated to Bitcoin have been caught collecting data, and selling it. Even when it hasn't been publicly declared, if you go, and sign up to a bunch of companies with throwaway emails or using the [email protected] method, you'll soon find out that the companies claiming not to sell your data are, because you'll suddenly over the next few weeks get a bunch of spam from random companies.

Although, there's probably not a lot that you can do, since the above method isn't exact proof, and wouldn't stand up in a court of law. So, while there might not be any cases to go on, that doesn't mean you should automatically trust them.

Only give your data to people, and companies you trust, and ideally you'll be able to count on two hands the amount of companies/people you trust. I can without a doubt in my mind say that altcoin wallets absolutely have been collecting data that you wasn't aware of, since there's a large amount of crap out there, which is quite openly a scam, so why wouldn't they abuse their user base via their wallet software too.

As for the main Bitcoin wallets, well most of them are open source, so you can verify it yourself. Basically, any closed sourced wallet software you shouldn't be using, and collecting your data would be the least of your concerns in that case.

You'll notice in some of the wallets that has swaps, there's the commission that they'll get and when you see that the fee they ask is higher than what the network is requiring.

With that little increase, that's how they make from it but all that has been said are all correct too. Some really don't have any means of making a commission through the wallet alone.

But in today's time, they won't spend time developing for nothing and be known to it, although a few noble devs really like to contribute.

This is the same as the video I found about facebook being free to use and they ask how will mark make the facebook survive then mark just said we run ads. That would be the case for other wallets to have ads on their app to earn while people can use their wallet app for storing coins. I would also agree with mk4's answer about how the they earn money.

I'm interested in point 3 of your answer. Are there known cases of this? Which crypto wallet companies or devs have been caught collecting data?

If we are talking about the monetization of wallets, then collecting data for this is not enough. It means that they earn on the sale of this data. Here I have one more question: are there cases when ads were published for data sale of various crypto wallet users?

Coinbase. While they have their exchange(that has a custodial wallet option), they also have a separate non-custodial wallet called Coinbase Wallet[1]. Pretty much a MetaMask competitor that I assume they made just to be able to spread the Coinbase brand name.

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[1] https://www.coinbase.com/wallet