Dear Dogecoin, I have been asked my opinion about a new version of a wallet, @MyDoge, in particular their Social Wallet feature. To keep things simple: with that setup, the private keys are held and used in third-party infrastructure through CubeSigner, so the transactions are signed remotely inside protected (but still remote) hardware. You are still depending on and trusting infrastructure operated by other companies, which was always problematic, but in this hectic and crazy security climate, even more so. As I mentioned about similar setups in the past, I find calling this simply "self-custody" misleading without explaining those dependencies and risks (and delegation of trust). On a note - unless you have already exported and safely backed up the separate Social Wallet seed, you will depend on those services for recovery. Being able to request your seed later is not the same as already having an independent backup. There is also a substantial privacy concern, which was also the case in past iterations of MyDoge linking wallets to X accounts. In the latest version, MyDoge’s own policy says BOTH MyDoge and its key-management provider process your sign-in identity and its association with your wallet. So, if there is any breach or leak, attackers could connect your identity to public addresses, balances and transaction history. Recent breaches and data leaks affecting crypto users are a reminder that privacy and personal data can become a security problem even when private keys are safe. It is not just a matter of private key security, but of user data leaks linking a wallet to its owners, which can lead to serious consequences in real life, including risks to physical safety (ESPECIALLY if your social profiles reveal your identity through photos, location, etc., and a lot of you are doing this). Finally, look at how many moving parts this introduces: social login, recovery email, 2FA, wallet software, signing policies and cloud infrastructure. All of this needs to remain secure through updates, outages and attacks. Keeping that whole setup safe over time is a very serious (and expensive) engineering challenge which requires good engineers. A simpler login does not, by itself, establish that your crypto is safer. It is convenient, and can help less tech savvy users, but not necessarily safer. It might make sense for wallets you use for holding very small amounts (but the privacy concerns stand), not if you are planning to hold long term on this setup. One final note: an old colleague and I wanted to take a closer look at these wallets using the testing setup we run together. However, MyDoge's terms explicitly prohibit decompilation and reverse engineering, and I cannot find publicly available source code for the current mobile app. They do publish some open source code, including an older browser extension (unmaintained so I recommend you do not use it right now), but that's, as far as I can see, mostly unrelated to the v3 wallet.

A bit of context on the "trademark" part (I recommend you follow John's feed with links to documents as he has been following this for years with many others). House of Doge does not own DOGE or DOGECOIN (nobody does). It has a contractual license from the Dogecoin Foundation / MadeUpNumbers to use certain claimed trademark rights. Those rights are jurisdiction-specific, contested in places, and far less absolute than the "worldwide" wording in here may suggest.