Edge review

Edge is the open source choice for someone who will not manage a seed phrase, and the thing worth reading before you trust it is how the company handled the one time it failed. In February 2023 a logging bug wrote unencrypted private keys to the phone's disk, and Edge published a full account of it that is still up: the vulnerability, the commits that introduced it in 2019 and 2022, an hour by hour timeline of the response, and who was not affected.

The bug needed two separate things to happen. A user had to open one of the buy or sell partners that ran inside the app (Bity, Wyre, Bitrefill, Ionia, Xanpool, LibertyX, Bitaccess, Bits of Gold, or Banxa by bank transfer), which logged the selected wallet, private key included, to the device. The same user then had to use the app's Upload Logs feature soon afterwards, which sent that log to Edge's servers. Edge scanned its log server and found approximately 600 private keys had reached it, which it put at less than 0.02 percent of the keys ever created on the platform, and it heard from users missing funds amounting to a low five figure sum in dollars. The fix shipped in version 3.3.1 about nine hours after the first report and deletes prior logs from disk. Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay purchases never touched the affected path.

How the wallet works is genuinely different from most of this list. You log in with a username and a password, then unlock with a PIN or biometrics, and you can be logged in on several devices at once. Your keys are encrypted on your device before anything is sent, so what Edge stores is a blob it cannot read: a zero knowledge backup rather than custody. That makes the password the thing that protects your money, which is the design's real cost, because reused and guessable passwords are everywhere and a written seed phrase at least cannot be typed into a fake website.

The source is public at github.com/EdgeApp, and Edge licenses the same key management to other developers as an API and SDK, so third parties do read it. Around the wallet sit a long list of partners: Banxa, MoonPay, Paybis, Simplex, Bits of Gold, LibertyX and Bity for buying and selling, ChangeNOW, SideShift, LetsExchange, Exolix, Godex, Swapuz and Maya for swaps, and Bitrefill for gift cards and mobile top-ups. Bitcoin is supported alongside Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, XRP, Dogecoin, Dash and more, and Android users can install a signed APK directly instead of going through Google Play.