7 best ways to keep your seed recovery phrase safe

In this fast paced, digital age everyone is looking to thrive in their respective lives. A few years ago, people sought after just the basic necessities but generation today want a life-style worthy to boost. Ways to expand the income or to add to it, are becoming part of a norm now. One promising way is to invest in crypto currencies.

Investing in crypto yields great results but greater the profit margins - greater the risk. The fear of losing this investment is no doubt daunting! Those who have made such investments know ways to secure their assets.

In this article I will talk about ways to safe-guard your crypto assets, discuss what a seed phrase is, what is the best way to secure your seed phrase and different kinds of seed phrase storage options in the market with a detailed comparison!

Ways to secure your crypto investments

When you first set up your crypto wallet, it generates a group of random words called the seed phrase. Keeping this seed phrase safe, secures your crypto assets. Seed phrase is often confused with private key, although both will allow a stranger to spend your coins but there is a significant difference.

Private Keys vs Seed Phrases

A seed phrase is a secret that only you can know no matter what. If any one else finds out this information, they can copy your crypto wallet and drain you of your assets. This happens because access to seed phrase allows them access to your private keys.

Private key is used to verify the ownership of a blockchain address.

Any random transaction can be sent to the public key but a private key is required to unlock these and to prove that you’re are the sole owner of this crypto transaction.

Keeping your seed phrase safe is hence highly important so that no one gets access to your private keys, preventing your huge financial losses.

Best ways to secure seed phrase

Seed phrase is like a digital guard keeping your bitcoins safe from harms way. A seed phrase contains valuable information with enough money to sometimes purchase a lavish hotel. Imagine the loss if this information finds its way out. For this reason, crypto wallets allow the user to encrypt a seed phrase with a password.

This password can be used to encrypt the seed phrase making it a two part/ two-factor phrase, combinations can be:

1.“Something you have” plus “something you know”

2.“Half phrase given by wallet” plus “something you know”

Crypto owners, this way, give a personal shield to their seed phrase. Both the seed phrase (generated by the wallet) and the extra words are then required to access the wallet.

This type of seed phrase is called “seed extension”, “extension word” or “13th/25th word”. If a pass phrase is not set up, an empty string can also be used instead “”.

Forgetting or losing this seed phrase password will most definitely result in the loss of all the bitcoins in the crypto wallet along with any other financial asset that was kept safe. Human memory is not the most reliable data storing facility, we forget passwords/phrases if they are not used often.

I would like to point here that the seed phrase password should not be confused with the regular “password” that used to safe the wallet file on your disks. To prevent this confusion the seed phrase password is called “extension word”.

What are the different ways to protect your seed phrase?

Many crypto currency owners write their seed phrases on a piece of paper and then lock them up in an environmentally safe deposit box. Many other prefer either one of the these, i.e., memorizing, engraving, stamping on metal, writing in a personal dairy, engraving on a stone – you get the idea!

Such methods have led to people losing their bitcoins accidentally because of failed backups, mistyped/misspelled letters, lost hard drives or corrupted files on SSD storage devices. It is off utmost importance to protect the seed phrase from such accidents because once lost there is no way to regain access to your crypto wallet.

These 12 words seed phrase is the most important piece of information therefore it could be a good idea to write some words (to explain or remember the seed phrase) on the paper. Advantage is that even if someone gets to read this phrase, they will not fully understand the message it hides. If, however you are scared that you might forget the message there are other ways to keep the seed phrase safe:

Paper and pencil backup

It is hard to believe but through some heart wrenching experience it has been found that one of the most practical storage mediums is pencil and paper. It works by encoding the private keys of a bitcoin into random words from a dictionary which can be written down.

Suppose that your hard drive crashes, you can always find this paper with the seed phrase and restore the entire wallet. The error correction is easy because these seed phrases use natural language words. Even words that are written in bad handwriting or if one/two letters are missing the words can often still be read.

The words used to make this seed phrase may seem random but the list drawn is carefully chosen so that the first four letters of each word are enough to identify it

Using a pencil to store the seed phrase on paper is much better than using a pen but the following points should be considered:

· Paper should be acid-free or archival paper.

· It should be stored in the dark avoiding extremes of heat and moisture.

Metal backup

Another durable way to secure your seed phrase is to get it stamped or engraved into metal. This type of backup is recommended when the environmental threats include fire, water or any kind of extreme temperature or physical stress.

There are many companies offering such metal storage options,

Crypto Platz is one such company that offers a metal vault capable of keeping your seed phrase secure for life. Crypto Platz operates on one sole mission “to make the use of blockchain technology easy and safe”

Crypto Platz Vault comes with a minimalistic design with:

· No cables and no battery (no need to be charged)

· NFC connection with iOS & Android

· Chip certification level CC EAL4, ISO/IEC 14443-A and ISO/IEC 7816-4

Contact us at https://www.cryptoplatz.ch/support to find out more.

Another such company is cryptosteel, they sale their crypto steel Cassette for seed phrase storage.

The Cassette is a pocket-sized stainless-steel unit designed to securely store the alphanumeric data of your choosing with no need for specialized tools or third-party involvement.

Have a look at a feature level comparison for a detailed insight:

	Crypto Platz Vault	The BillFold	Paper Recovery Phrase
	99 €	99 €	0 C
Water resistant	Yes	Yes	No
Fire resistant	Yes	Yes	No
Snow resistant	Yes	Yes	No
Bugs resistant	Yes	Yes	No
Shock resistant	Yes	Yes	Yes
Metal stainless	Yes	Yes	N/A
Encrypted	Yes	No	No
Offline	Yes	Yes	Yes
Easy to use	Yes	No	Yes
No battery	Yes	Yes	Yes
Protected by password	Yes	No	No
Warranty Forever	Yes	No	No
Open source	Yes	No
Weight	16 Grams	400 Grams	0.001Grams
Country	Switzerland	France	Your home

Feature level comparison for seed phrase storage options

What to avoid?

A risky way to store your seed phrase is to use a file on a computer or to store it online.

Some crypto currency owners split up their 12 words seed phrase into 6 words string and keep one half in one location and the other in a separate place. This is a bad idea because if one half is discovered then with force location for other can be extracted. If such an option is sought then a multi signature wallet should be used.

One other flop idea is to add decoy words that may be meaningful to you and can be removed later to make a 12-word phrase. Mostly these decoy words are taken from a known dictionary which can be used by anyone to make sense of the seed phrase.

The only way one should opt to memorize their crypto wallet seed phrases is when they are at a risk of facing a hostile situation e.g., crossing a border where one is expected to be searched etc.

What was discussed in this article?

It is highly important to safe guard your crypto currency by securing your wallet with a seed phrase. A seed phrase usually contains between 12 and 24 random words, which if falls into wrong hands can cause major financial loss.

The ways discussed in this article to safe guard your seed phrase is:

· Paper and pencil backup

· Seed Phrase splitting

· Hard drive storage

· Metal storage

A seed phrase is not your regular password therefore it can not be changed or recovered, it should always be kept well hidden and safe.

Crypto Platz understands the severity with which your important information i.e., seed phrase needs to be protected. Keeping the market/environmental dynamics in hindsight we have created this product i.e., Crypto platz Vault, that enable crypto currency owners to safe guard their seed phrases with 100% theft proof methods. Our Crypto Platz are offline, simple to use, encrypted and durable. Contact us for more information at https://www.cryptoplatz.ch/support