Keep Your Cryptocurrency Secure At CB Lockers
Cryptocurrency has become a mainstream investment, with most private and institutional investors allocating anywhere from a small to a significant portion of their portfolios to it.
Although the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency makes it inherently very safe and private, your investment is only as secure as your access to it.
In fact, it is estimated that 20% of all cryptocurrency, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, has been lost forever as people’s private keys which are required to access their accounts were misplaced, forgotten about, or stolen.
Digital wallets, known as hot wallets, are required for users to make cryptocurrency transactions. Wallets stored on cryptocurrency exchanges, laptops, or mobile phones, are generally stored on online servers and are therefore susceptible to hacking and phishing scams. You should therefore never keep more coins on this type of wallet than you need to trade on a regular basis or transact at any given time.
These digital wallets consist of public keys that you need to share with people to be able to send funds to you, and private keys which you need to access these funds. Therefore these private keys are the most important thing to keep safe.
So what is the best way to store your private keys?
The safest place to store your private keys is a cold wallet, as it is completely offline and therefore cannot be hacked. You can use a paper wallet by simply printing or writing down your private key on a piece of paper and storing it somewhere safe. The other popular method is to use a hardware wallet, which looks like a USB device, and can store your private keys safely.
In case you ever lose or damage this device, you can write down a recovery phrase, known as a seed phrase, which consists of 12-24 words, that can be used to restore your private keys on a new device. Ledger and Trezor are two of the most popular and trusted brands of hardware wallet devices. Please note that you should never buy a secondhand wallet as it may be compromised.
We suggest that the best way to keep your cryptocurrency secure is by putting a hardware wallet in a safe deposit box. If you want it to be even more secure, you can write down the recovery phrase on paper and keep it in another safe deposit box, preferably in a different branch, as this creates redundancy in case one fails for any reason.
There is, however, another reason for people losing their cryptocurrency at an alarmingly high rate. The average age of cryptocurrency owners is only 38 years, so they usually do not think about death and inheritance at this age and do not have a backup plan of what to do if anything happens to them. You can either make a will and give instructions to someone to access your safe deposit box, or if you don’t have a will, we can help you set up a nominee who will be able to access the contents of your safe deposit box if anything should happen to you.
Contact us today, and we will help you set up the best way to secure your cryptocurrency not only for you but also for your future generations! If you go for the most secure option by opening an account at two of our branches simultaneously, you will get a 20% discount for the smallest size at both locations until the end of your lease, as long as you renew both accounts together.
