Crypto Wallet Service Attempts To Promote Itself, Gets Firmly Rebuffed By Elon Musk

Freewallet, an online-hosted crypto wallet service attempted to promote their service by jumping on the Dogecoin bandwagon started by Elon Musk.

However, their ill-advised PR stunt promptly – and very publicly – backfired.

Heavy Criticism Due To Non-Ownership Of Keys

The company retweeted one of Elon’s many Doge-related tweets, announcing that Doge is readily available on their app.

Unfortunately for them, Twitter can often be the Wild West, and Elon Musk promptly criticized their services. Stating that the “always online” approach should not be trusted when it comes to cryptocurrency, Elon Musk replied to the promotional message with his views on their service.

Freewallet defended themselves, stating that hosting tokens on their own servers allows them to offer “bank-level” customer support and security. It’s worth mentioning that if we’re taking into account the customer support some banks offer, this may have been a poor choice of words.

“The accusations relating to this fact are never followed by a support ticket. People saying ‘stay away from Freewallet’ express prejudice towards custodial wallets because they believe that a ‘true’ blockchain wallet is supposed to leave the management of private keys to the user (no). However, there are other services (like exchanges) that have access to user private keys.”

Avid crypto users have criticized online storage for a long time, stating that an app that is always online can be attacked by bad actors – an event that, although rare, still does happen. To be fair, despite strong messages in favor of storing crypto on your own hard wallets from many sources – such as Aussie exchange Swyftx – many are still keeping their assets on exchanges. For instance, up to 92% of institutional investors do not host their own crypto assets.