Trust Wallet: what it is, who owns it and how it works

What Trust Wallet is

Trust Wallet is a self-custodial, multichain crypto wallet available as an iOS and Android app and as a browser extension. Its terms of service say that "you, and only you" control your assets and private keys, and that Trust Wallet does not obtain or keep your wallet password, private key or secret phrase. The company says keys are generated and stored encrypted on your device, never on its servers, and that it supports more than 100 blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Tron, TON and Sui.

Beyond holding and sending assets, the app connects to decentralized applications and bundles services that third parties provide: swaps, buying and selling for local currency, staking and stablecoin "Earn" products, perpetual futures, prediction markets and tokenized real-world assets. Availability of the trading and earn features varies by region.

Who owns and runs Trust Wallet

Trust Wallet's about page dates the project to 2017. On 31 July 2018 Binance announced that it had completed the acquisition of Trust Wallet, its first public acquisition. That announcement now carries a note added by Binance: "As of 15 May 2025, Trust Wallet is no longer owned or controlled by the Binance Exchange Group." Neither Binance nor Trust Wallet names the new owner on the pages we opened.

The legal operator is also hard to pin down. The terms of service (last updated 1 January 2024) refer only to "Trust Wallet, and/or its affiliates" and give no company name or address. The iOS App Store lists the seller as DApps Platform Software Services Ltd. The terms put disputes under Hong Kong law, with individual arbitration at the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre and a class-action waiver. Trust Wallet's about page says it serves more than 200 million people, a company figure that has not been independently audited.

How Trust Wallet works

1. Install from an official store. Trust Wallet says it publishes only through the App Store, Google Play and official browser extension stores. Fake apps and lookalike sites are a common route to theft.
2. Create or import a wallet. The app generates a secret phrase that controls every address in the wallet. You can keep your own backup, or use the optional encrypted cloud backup, which stores an encrypted copy in your own iCloud or Google Drive account that only your password can decrypt. Trust Wallet says it cannot reset or recover that password.
3. Receive and send. Each network has its own address format, and each transaction pays that network's gas fee, which Trust Wallet does not set.
4. Use built-in services. Swaps, purchases and staking are routed to third-party providers. The terms say Trust Wallet does not control these services and disclaims liability for them.

Trust Wallet fees

Trust Wallet's terms say most fees are "primarily established by our third-party partners" and shown in the app, that Trust Wallet may receive a revenue share from some of those third-party fees, and that it may introduce its own charges in the future. Its pages do not describe swap pricing consistently:

• The swap page's FAQ says Trust Wallet "does not charge any additional service fees for swaps". It says the costs are network gas and provider fees, which are built into each quote and are not paid to Trust Wallet.
• Trust Wallet's own April 2026 wallet comparison lists its platform swap fee as "0.7% (in rate)". Its campaign pages advertise a 0% "Trust Wallet swap fee" on eligible same-chain stablecoin pairs and on staked or wrapped asset pairs, with "the standard applicable fee" applying otherwise.
• Trust Wallet Premium, a loyalty program, gives Silver members 10% and Gold members 20% off swap fees, for a limited time.

In practice, the quote screen is the figure to rely on: compare the amount you will receive with the market rate. If a $1,000 swap returns $990 of the target asset, you are paying about 1% all-in, whatever the fee is called. Trust Wallet's comparison post says buying, staking, sending and receiving carry no Trust Wallet fee. Third-party on-ramp fees, validator commissions and network fees still apply.

TWT and Trust Wallet Premium

TWT is the token associated with Trust Wallet. In Trust Wallet Premium, which ranks users into Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers based on activity points called Trust XP, locking TWT speeds up tier progress. Paying network fees in TWT instead of the network's native coin is discounted by 20% to 50% depending on tier, and swaps into TWT carry no gas fee. Trust Wallet says the program's figures are subject to change.

Countries and restrictions

No account or identity check is needed to install the wallet. The terms bar people in jurisdictions comprehensively sanctioned by the US, naming Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, as well as anyone on US, UN, UK or EU sanctions lists. Third-party providers for buying, selling, perps and earn products apply their own eligibility rules and identity checks, which is why these features differ by country.

Security model and the 2025 extension incident

Trust Wallet is a hot wallet: keys sit on an internet-connected phone or computer. Our explainer on hot and cold wallets covers the trade-off. The app includes a Security Scanner that checks transactions and dapp connections against known risk signals, which Trust Wallet itself calls "a prompt to look closer, not a guarantee". The site shows ISO-certification and GDPR badges without naming the ISO standard.

The most serious incident on record involves the browser extension. In its incident update (published 30 December 2025, updated 17 July 2026), Trust Wallet says an unauthorized version 2.68 was published to the Chrome Web Store on 24 December 2025, outside its normal release process. It believes the attacker obtained the extension's source code and Chrome Web Store API key through the November 2025 Sha1-Hulud supply-chain attack, which exposed developers' GitHub secrets. The update reports:

• 2,520 wallet addresses drained, with about $8.5 million in assets associated with 17 attacker-controlled addresses, figures it says may change;
• only users who opened and logged in to v2.68 between 24 and 26 December 2025 were affected, and the mobile app was not;
• the clean v2.67 code was re-released as v2.69, publishing credentials were revoked and release controls tightened;
• Trust Wallet is voluntarily reimbursing affected users case by case after ownership checks, and had received more than 5,000 claims, many of them likely duplicates or fraudulent.

Support impersonation is the other recurring risk. Trust Wallet's support post points users to its Help Center and in-app chatbot, which can escalate to human agents, and does not list a phone line. It says support will never contact you first, ask for your recovery phrase or request remote access to your device. Our guide to avoiding wallet scams covers the patterns.

Is Trust Wallet open source?

Partly. Its cross-chain key and signing library, Wallet Core, is public on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence, along with the token assets repository and developer tools. The public iOS and Android app repositories in the trustwallet GitHub organization are archived and were last updated in 2019, so the current apps cannot be checked against public source.

Alternatives by function

These are categories, not recommendations.

• A wallet built around EVM networks and dapps: MetaMask, which now also holds Solana and Bitcoin addresses; see our MetaMask profile.
• A desktop-and-mobile wallet from a listed company: Exodus, made by NYSE American-listed Exodus Movement; see our Exodus profile.

Trust Wallet is also assessed separately in our Trust Wallet review. This profile describes the wallet and its operator and does not grade it.