Why do you need safe seed phrase storage
It is very important to keep your seed phrase secure at all times. Losing your seed phrase might cost you all your funds stored in a wallet. This is why you should protect it not only from water and fire but also from throwing it out by accident. Durable seed phrase backup tools can help you with long-time seed phrase storage.
Seed phrase safety is important
With seed phrase, everyone can access your wallet contents. Also, if you lose your recovery phrase, you can lose all the coins you own. Almost all cryptocurrency users use hardware or software wallets to keep their coins.
Cryptocurrencies use private keys and seed phrases for access and recovery. This includes Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. Most people use software or hardware wallets to keep all their private keys safe and secure from hackers. Wallets let you use one key – a seed phrase instead of multiple private keys, while also keeping the private keys hidden for safety. The seed phrase is both an access key to your whole wallet but also a recovery code. This means that with a seed phrase you can restore your full wallet with all addresses, accounts, and balances in case your wallet breaks down. Your wallet will ask you to write a copy/backup of your mnemonic seed phrase on paper when setting up.
As we said earlier, the seed phrase grants full access to the wallet and gives the full set of instructions to a wallet to set up and access accounts with balances. Almost all wallets nowadays use BIP39 standard to create seed phrases and recover your wallet contents. You have to remember that a hardware wallet is just a piece of electronics and is vulnerable to damage. Also software wallets can become corrupted by malware or user error. All wallets can easily become locked if you put your PIN/password wrong few times. After that you need to recover your wallet with a seed phrase. When this time comes, you better have a good backup available.
We should say it once more – usually losing your seed recovery phrase = losing all your cryptocurrency funds stored in a wallet.
Keeping your seed phrase backup on paper is a bad idea
Paper is fragile and can be easily destroyed or made unreadable. There are many situations that can make your paper seed backup useless and cost you thousands of dollars in your Bitcoins.
Sometimes ink can fade just after a few months or years and you will not realize it until it is too late. This depends on the pen manufacturer but the ink can fade and it is hard to predict if or when this happens.
Paper is very susceptible to water or moisture when stored. Some roof or pipe leaks can easily make your paper wet and it can destroy it altogether or make it unreadable. Not to mention flooding.
Paper is also very flammable. In an event of a house or apartment fire both your hardware wallet and computer with software wallet will be easily destroyed. Your paper copy of the seed phrase will also burn down and you will be left with no access to your funds forever. Even keeping paper backup in a metal safe might not be enough. Firefighters also use a lot and lots of water to put the fire down and this will flood everything in the house, making recovery even harder.
Your insurance will probably pay you for your destroyed house and furniture and maybe even some fancy art collection. But they will not reimburse you for your lost cryptocurrency portfolio because your seed phrase burned down.
Moreover, it happens quite often that you simply throw out your paper backup by accident when cleaning up your garage or attic from old stuff. Paper backups are usually kept with other paper documents and you can simply forget about them after a long time or your family member can just throw out this weird-looking piece of paper.
Best solution for seed phrase storage
Anyone who is serious about their Bitcoins or crypto portfolio uses proper metal backup to secure their future. The best kind of seed phrase backup is made of stainless steel that has excellent durability and is resistant to rust.
Coinplate stainless steel crypto wallets can survive a lot. You can easily trust this 3/8” (10mm) thick stainless steel sandwich to protect your seed phrase from all possible accidents and disasters. This kind of seed phrase storage tool can survive almost anything you can encounter like a house fire or collapse, floods, acids, rust and impact while being perfectly readable even in 20 years.
Coinplate is easily the best solution for long-term seed phrase storage. Our customers sleep well at night knowing that their crypto holdings are safe, regardless of what the future brings. You can feel safe when going on vacation and not have to worry about the safety of your bitcoins back at home.
