Argent Wallet Review 2026: Now Ready, Security and Reviews

Argent, Ready and Ready X: which product is which

The rebrand left three products on the market:

• Ready. The consumer mobile app, built as an on-chain alternative to a bank. Deposits in 6 fiat currencies from 150+ countries, BTC and USDC yield, and the now-suspended card.
• Ready X. The mobile app for crypto-native users. Swaps, ETH, STRK and Bitcoin staking, DeFi, perpetual futures through Extended Exchange and multisig. The App Store listing changed from Ready Wallet to Ready X with version 1.6.0 in June 2026.
• Ready Wallet extension. The former Argent X for Chrome and Firefox, with 300,000 users on the Chrome Web Store.

The extension and the mobile apps hold separate wallets. The extension terms state this directly: a wallet created in the browser cannot be opened in the Argent app. New users who expect one account across devices end up with two.

Network coverage narrowed over time. Argent began on Ethereum mainnet, added zkSync, then bet on Starknet. It stopped zkSync Era development and began reducing support for those accounts on 31 January 2024, advising users to move assets to MetaMask or bridge them to Starknet. Today Ready is a Starknet wallet. ETH, WBTC and USDC appear in it as Starknet tokens.

How keys and recovery work

Every Ready account is a smart contract on Starknet. The contract decides who signs, which limits apply and how recovery runs. Two keys matter:

• Owner key. Generated and stored on the user's device. It signs every transaction.
• Guardian. By default the Argent guardian service, which co-signs for built-in 2FA and fraud checks. Users are free to set a hardware wallet or another account as guardian instead.

The guardian does not move funds alone. Its role is to approve a recovery that replaces a lost owner key.

Recovery depends on the product:

1. Mobile app. The user verifies the email linked to the wallet and passes 2FA, and the guardian approves a new owner key. No seed phrase exists to back up.
2. Extension, standard account. A 12-word recovery phrase. Lose it together with the password, and the extension wallet is gone, as the terms state.
3. Extension, smart account. The recovery phrase plus email-based guardian protection.

The trade-off is plain. Email recovery removes the seed phrase as a single point of failure and adds a dependency on the email account and on Argent's guardian service. If Ready disappeared, the contracts stay on Starknet, and users with self-chosen guardians could still recover through other wallets that support the Argent contract standard.

Security record and audits

Argent's account contracts are public on GitHub under GPL-3.0, and the extension source is public too. We found no public repository for the mobile apps. Published audits:

Argent says exchanges including Binance, Kraken and OKX use its Starknet account contract.

Two vulnerabilities reached the public, and both ended without losses.

June 2020, Ethereum. OpenZeppelin researcher Alice Henshaw found that wallets without guardians could be taken over through the recovery process (CVE-2020-15302). The bug came from a 30 March 2020 update. OpenZeppelin counted 329 wallets holding 162 ETH as exposed. Argent put the at-risk number at 61 wallets, contacted owners, triggered precautionary recoveries on 35 inactive wallets itself and shipped the fix on 19 June. Zero funds were lost, and OpenZeppelin received a bug bounty.

November 2022, Starknet. The Braavos team found that Argent X 5.0 contracts accepted a legacy transaction with an empty signature, which bypassed validation. Braavos proved it by moving ETH out of a test account. Argent fixed the issue within 3 hours of disclosure and reported no impacted accounts.

Neither incident was a hack. Both were caught by outside researchers, and the disclosure trail is complete. That is what an open-source security model is supposed to produce.

The Ready Card: launched, restricted, shut down

The card was the headline feature of the rebrand. It went badly.

Argent launched the Metal card in March 2025 and a free Lite card a few months later. Both were Mastercard debit cards spending USDC straight from the smart account, issued through Kulipa, a regulated e-money institution that also ran KYC. Metal cost 120 USDC a year and paid 3% back in STRK. Lite was free with 0.5% back and a 1% FX fee. New cards went only to UK and EEA residents, so Canadians never qualified.

Then the issuer moved. On 16 June 2026 Ready deactivated cards outside the EEA, with one hour's notice. Metal subscribers got refunds of remaining fees. On 30 July 2026 Kulipa began winding down, and the program became unavailable everywhere (SpendNode). No new issuer and no relaunch date had been announced as of 4 November 2026.

Funds were never at risk, because the card spent from a self-custody contract and Kulipa held only a USDC-limited session key. The lesson concerns dependency. A self-custody wallet still loses a feature overnight when the regulated partner behind it changes plans.

What users report

Ratings vary sharply by store, and the counts matter more than the stars:

The high extension score comes mostly from the Starknet airdrop years, when Argent X was the default way in. Older Firefox reviews praise speed and low Starknet fees. The recent one-star reviews on Firefox are something else. Three posted in the same month promote a "fund recovery agency" with email and WhatsApp contacts, a classic recovery scam that targets people who already lost money. They say nothing real on the wallet itself. Ready X reviewers mention button lag on new iPhones. Trustpilot has too few reviews to read a pattern from.

The practical warning follows from that. Ready support does not ask for a recovery phrase, and no third party "recovers" funds from a self-custody wallet for a fee.

Who it suits and who should look elsewhere

Ready fits a specific user:

• Starknet users who want the wallet that, by Ready's count, 7 in 10 Starknet users choose
• People who want self-custody without a seed phrase on mobile
• Users who value sponsored gas and built-in 2FA over multi-chain reach

It does not fit:

• Anyone who needs Ethereum mainnet, Solana, Bitcoin or EVM layer 2 networks in one wallet
• Users who want a crypto card today, in Canada or anywhere else
• People who need hardware-wallet-only signing for every transaction

For a multi-chain setup, a general wallet plus a Starknet account in Ready covers both needs. For Starknet alone, Ready's contract record runs back to 2022 and carries reviews from two independent audit firms.