Wallets & Security
6 guides and tools on wallets & security.
Custody, seed phrases, hardware wallets and the scams that separate people from their funds. The most consequential section on this site.
Crypto Wallet Security: A Practical Guide
Most crypto losses are not sophisticated. They are a seed phrase photographed on a phone, a fake support agent, or a signature approved…
Wallets & SecurityHow Crypto Scams Work, and How to Spot Them
Crypto fraud is not usually technically clever. It works by manufacturing urgency, trust or greed faster than your judgement can catch …
Wallets & SecurityHardware Wallets: What They Do and How to Use One
A hardware wallet solves one problem extremely well: it stops a compromised computer from ever seeing your private key.…
Wallets & SecuritySeed Phrases: What They Are and How to Protect One
Twelve ordinary English words are the single most valuable thing most crypto holders own, and most people store them worse than they st…
Wallets & SecurityWhat Is a Crypto Wallet?
A wallet does not hold coins. It holds keys, and the difference matters for every decision you make afterwards.…
Wallets & SecurityTwo-Factor Authentication for Crypto Accounts
SIM swapping has cost crypto holders hundreds of millions, and it defeats SMS two-factor authentication completely.…
About this section
This is the most consequential section on the site, because almost every large loss in cryptocurrency traces back to something covered here rather than to a price movement.
The losses are rarely sophisticated. A seed phrase photographed on a phone that syncs to a cloud account. A support agent who direct-messaged first. A signature approved without reading what permission it granted. A device bought from a marketplace listing rather than the manufacturer. A wallet address copied from a transaction history that an attacker had deliberately poisoned. Each of these is defeated by a pause of sixty seconds and a fixed habit, and each continues to cost people everything they hold.
The structural point underneath all of it is that possession of a key is ownership. There is no separate record establishing that funds are yours, no institution to appeal to, no chargeback and no recovery process. That property is what makes the system censorship-resistant, and it is also what makes mistakes permanent.
The guides here cover choosing between custody models honestly, storing a seed phrase so it survives fire and time, what a hardware wallet does and specifically does not protect against, and the fraud patterns that account for the largest reported losses. None of it requires technical knowledge to follow.