Hardware Wallets are currently the best solution to securely store cryptocurrency. What if the hardware is defective? A secure backup must withstand all weathers and conditions so that the coins are still available in the event of a failure.

Online Wallets are never safe

The number of hijacked or hacked Online Exchanges in recent weeks shows more and more that the Crypto market is becoming more and more interesting for criminals. The times with the storage of coins at Exchanges are unfortunately over and should be remembered by every serious Cryptocurrency user. Not your key, not your coin“ shows that security is playing an increasingly important role in the still relatively new segment.

Example of the actual top hacked exchanges at the beginning of 2019 

Binance 7000 BTC Hack

Cryptopia Exchange Hacked

 

Hardware Wallets are at the moment state of the art

For the secure storage of cryptographic currencies, there are already several well-known manufacturers on the market who offer hardware wallets. They store the private key on the hardware wallet.

 

 

Backup recovery seed for the worst case

However, if this hardware wallet becomes defective or stolen, the only last chance to recover is by using a Recovery Seed as a reminder. The private key can be derived mnemonic phrase from the 12 or 24-word seed in the variation of 2048 in the BIP39 wordlist.

Therefore a seed should always be kept safe. With Secure, offline storage should be considered. The history of cryptocurrencies has often reported of hijacked wallets that went the detour via cloud storage or locally stored hard disk where the seed was available in plain text for the hacker to read. 

Remember „Not your Seed, Not your Wallet!“

As a final security point, the safe storage of the seed phrase for restoring the private bowl of one or more multi wallets should be considered. There is no point in purchasing the most expensive hardware equipment if the recovery key is stored on cloud storage in plain text and can be hijacked by one or more hackers.

 

Having recovery seed on paper and thus available offline is already a good step. However, the paper is very sensitive to fire or water damage.

In order to avoid these mishaps more and more „Hard Recovery Plates“ are coming onto the market. To be on the safe side, I exposed one of my recovery seed plates to adverse situations. In this case, a plate was exposed to fire in a Swedish furnace for several hours without protection. According to CryptoTag, this titanium plate should be able to withstand temperatures of up to 1665 °C without damage.

 

Extreme Test in Sweden Ofen

 

Here a few pictures from the result after the Sweden oven test. Some places are burned in, but after a surface cleaning with a steel brush, the seed words can be clearly recognized. As conclusion, it makes sense to store the seeds on external weather-resistant plates.