Articles · Comparisons
Both wallets are self-custody, both are free, both install in five minutes. The difference is not in the feature list but in two things: how many networks you need and how much you are willing to pay for swaps. We compare on what can be checked rather than on impressions.
14 September 2026 · verified at publication
Rainbow. Twenty-four networks, including every major layer on top of Ethereum, and the best presentation available today: balances, history and digital collectibles read without effort.
Trust Wallet, and that settles it. Rainbow works only with EVM networks, and bitcoin cannot be put into it at all.
Do the arithmetic on the fee. Rainbow takes its 0.85% on every swap — openly and always. Trust Wallet charges nothing as a separate line, but earns on the price spread, which you do not see. Which works out dearer depends on the amount and the pair.
| Point | Rainbow | Trust Wallet |
|---|---|---|
| Who holds the key | you | you |
| Networks | 24, all EVM | 100+, including bitcoin, Solana, Cosmos, Sui |
| App Store rating | 4.64 | 4.65 |
| Ratings left | 4,192 | 198,872 |
| Swap fee | 0.85%, declared | publishes no separate figure |
| Trading leverage | up to 50× | up to 200× |
| Own token | RNBW, Base network | TWT, BNB Smart Chain network |
| Token market cap | … | … |
| Code is open | yes, the whole app | partly: the wallet-core library |
| Browser extension | yes | yes |
Ratings and review counts come from Apple's public listing on the day of publication. Rainbow's network count is from its support page, Trust Wallet's from the site's home page. Market caps are from CoinGecko. All of it moves; the figures in the table are a snapshot, not a constant.
The ratings are all but identical — 4.64 and 4.65. The number of people who left them differs by a factor of forty-seven: four thousand against two hundred thousand. That does not read as "Trust is better", it reads as different weight classes. The practical meaning is this: a large wallet gets rare breakages fixed faster, because more people report them, while being a more attractive target for whoever writes fake apps and phishing sites.
The other side of it is that in a small product the developer's hand shows more clearly. What the Rainbow team is fixing in the code today is visible in the Pulse feed: it is assembled straight from the open repositories, with nothing retold in between.
Both wallets issued a token, and both promise holders discounts and rewards. But the money comes from different places, and that matters more than any percentage in an advert.
Rainbow takes 0.85% on a swap and returns part of it to token holders — from a quarter of it up to all of it, depending on how many tokens sit in your wallet. Payouts are therefore tied to the app's revenue: more swaps, more cashback; fewer swaps, less.
Trust Wallet builds a tier programme around its token: hold more and you get fee discounts and extra features. There is no separate declared rate of return here, as Rainbow's 0.85% is, which makes the benefit harder to work out in advance.
RNBW's market cap is …, TWT's …. A difference of that order also means the same difference in how easily the price can be moved. A small token rises faster and falls faster, and a large position in it cannot be sold at the price shown on the chart.
A full look at RNBW against TWT, SFP and UNI is in a separate article: how a wallet token differs from an exchange token and from a protocol token.
The Rainbow app is published in full, and anyone can look at what it does. Trust Wallet has its wallet-core library open — the part that handles keys — but not the app itself. For a wallet that matters: closed code cannot be checked, only believed.
A declared 0.85% is unpleasant, but it is visible. A spread baked into the rate feels nicer and does not come cheaper — you simply do not notice it.
The mechanics of RNBW payouts are written in a smart contract that can be read. That is exactly what we do: the staking yield on our site is computed from the contract's state rather than taken from an announcement.
Bitcoin, Solana, Cosmos, Sui. For Rainbow none of this exists, and there is no way around it.
Two hundred thousand ratings stand for years of dealing with rare and unpleasant cases. A young product has no such history by definition.
If the token itself interests you as an asset, TWT trades an order of magnitude more widely and is easier to sell.
Both wallets are self-custody. That means the key is yours and yours alone: neither Rainbow nor Trust Wallet can return your access, cancel a transfer or freeze somebody else's. A secret phrase written down on paper counts for more than any line in the table above — money lost through it is returned by no wallet at all.
And one more thing they have in common, worth noticing: over the past year both products have shifted towards trading. Rainbow's home page carries leverage of up to 50× and bets on how events turn out; Trust Wallet's goes up to 200×. A wallet that earns on turnover has an interest in you trading more often. Keeping that in mind is more useful than arguing about whose interface looks nicer.
Nothing stops you installing the two of them: each has its own secret phrase and the wallets know nothing about each other. A sensible split is to keep what you use every day in one and what simply sits there in the other. One device, one wallet and all the money in it is a setup that breaks all at once.