Having your crypto seed storage is essential when it comes to investing in cryptocurrencies. It's a 24-word or 12-word phrase to access the coins you bought or mined without relying on a third-party service or account.
It's also an offline backup of your wallet. You don't have to trust anyone with your seed, because it's stored on a piece of paper (or another medium) instead of the cloud. In this article, we'll show you how to keep your cryptocurrency seeds safe so that you can access them and send funds where they need to go!
What is a Crypto Seed
Unlike storing your coins in exchanges like Binance or Coinbase, storing coins in hot wallets or cold wallets will provide you with a backup for your account. This backup for your cryptocurrency is called the Seed, also known as the Mnemonics, seed phrases, recovery seeds, and more.
When you create a new account in a wallet, the wallet will randomly generate your private keys. The private keys provide access to your accounts and allow to recreate your accounts in other wallets.
Private keys are made up of random letters and numbers, and are difficult to remember. Your wallet will help you recreate the private key into a set of 12 or 24 words called the mnemonics. This is what we refer to as crypto seed, recovery seed, or backup seed.
To be precise, the crypto seed is the simplified version of the private keys which gives us full access to our wallet accounts.
Why do I Need a Seed to Store my Cryptocurrency
Storing your cryptocurrency inside a hot wallet or a cold wallet is already secure enough by itself. It is already much more secured than storing on an exchange where you might not even know when you will lose access to your crypto.
Nonetheless, what will you do if you suddenly break your cold wallet, or what if your phone suddenly breaks down and your hot wallet is gone?
This is where the seeds come in handy. Every wallet has a function for you to import wallets using seeds. When a seed is input into the wallet, the account associated with that seed will be fully recreated or recovered into the wallet.
Using the seed, if you lose access to your wallet, you can quickly buy a new cold wallet or download a hot wallet on another smartphone and use your recovery seeds to recover your existing wallets. Therefore, all of your assets will be restored.
Knowing this background, storing your seeds becomes very important because they are the only backup to your wallet. If you lose your seeds, damage to your wallet will result in losing your assets forever.
If you want to keep your cryptocurrency with you for as long as possible, it is significant to study how to keep your recovery seeds or the mnemonics safe.
How to Store Your Seeds Securely
There are many ways to store your seeds. Most people write them down on a piece of paper and hide the paper in a safe place. Some people will take that paper and store it in a bank.
Nonetheless, paper can deteriorate, get wet, or grow mold. Not to mention, ink can also fade away. If this happens to your Seeds then your backup is in danger.
The best way to store your seeds is to store them in what cryptocurrency experts call a steel wallet.
Store your Seeds Inside a Steel Wallet
Steel wallets are specialized steel plates made to store crypto seeds. They usually come with pieces of steel, engraved with letters. You can line up these letters to match your mnemonics, insert them into the steel wallet, and lock everything down securely. Therefore, you will have your mnemonics set securely on engraved steel which will never fade away.
Steel wallets are waterproof, fireproof, mold proof, and can survive most accidents. It is designed to make sure that your mnemonics will survive for a very long time. To protect your seeds from theft, you can also install a secure lock to prevent other people to access them.
A great example of a high-quality steel wallet that you can trust is the ELLIPAL Seed Phrase Steel. It is corrosion-resistant, made of grade 316/304 high-quality stainless steel, and resistant to water, salt, and acid. It can also tolerate the heat of up to 1454C.
In general, with a steel wallet, no matter be it flood or fire, you can be sure that your cryptocurrency backup will always be safe.