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Key Takeaways: Best Cold Storage Wallet
A cold storage wallet ensures that no sensitive information, like keys or recovery phrases, is ever generated online. It’s less convenient than a hot wallet but more secure. The best cold wallets offer many of the features of a cryptocurrency exchange, including buying, selling, and staking, while keeping passwords securely offline. Our top pick, the Ledger Nano S Plus, is the most versatile. The Trezor Model T is a great premium choice, with a touchscreen and redundant recovery phrases. KeepKey and CoolWallet Pro have native support for decentralized apps, and the SecuX V20 is useful on the widest range of platforms.
A cold wallet is a type of crypto wallet that stores crypto credentials without being connected to the internet. Your private key never appears on any online device, so hackers can never see it. If you’re concerned about the safety of your crypto, especially with the number of exchanges in legal trouble lately, we’re here to help you pick the best cold wallet.
Putting your crypto in a cold wallet doesn’t necessarily mean using software or even hardware. The simplest form of cold storage is writing down your public and private keys and seed phrases on a piece of paper. As you’ve probably guessed, this is an extremely insecure method — if you lose the paper or if someone steals it, you’ve permanently lost access to your crypto. The best cold storage wallets store your keys in a physical wallet that’s far less likely to get lost or destroyed. These hardware wallets, which often run on USB drives, handle every transaction in an offline quarantine to eliminate any chance of a leak. It’s a bit less convenient but a lot more secure.
The opposite of a cold crypto wallet is a hot wallet or online wallet, which trades crypto while connected to the internet. If you’re looking for a hot wallet, our best crypto wallet rundown has some great choices. If you’re after the best cold storage wallet, read on.
What Makes the Best Cold Wallet
Since crypto isn’t anonymous without extra precautions, security is the most important factor, but there are several other considerations. A cold wallet device should be easy to use, support the crypto you hold and the blockchains you trade on, have any other features you need, and come at an affordable price.
Ledger Nano S Plus — Best cold wallet
Trezor Model T — Best wallet for beginners
KeepKey — Best wallet for Web 3.0
CoolWallet Pro — Best wallet for mobile
SecuX V20 — Best cross-platform cold wallet
For this list, we only considered cryptocurrency wallets that had an impeccable security record — not a single case of theft since appearing on the market. We don’t consider paper wallets secure, so any contender had to use the latest hardware. There are cold wallets that can switch to a hot mode, but they had to do so without any hint of leaks for us to consider them. We also heavily favored wallets that are easy to use. A recovery option was vital; we can’t recommend any device that locks your account if the device goes missing. Recent models come with modern quality-of-life features like touchscreens, Bluetooth, and encrypted PINs to secure against physical attacks. Next, we considered support. A cold storage wallet should work on all of the devices you own and should be capable of trading all of the assets you plan to store and retrieve. Not all cold wallets work with all available blockchains, so we’ll indicate the entries on our list that don’t support any major projects. Of course, price was also important — you’re in crypto to make money, after all. If two wallets had extremely similar features, we picked the more affordable one. Finally, all of these wallets work for popular currencies like Bitcoin (see What Is Bitcoin?) along with plenty of lesser-known altcoins.
The 5 Best Cold Wallets for Crypto
In the end, crypto cold wallets are all pretty similar. It’s about finding one you’ll be able to make a habit of using. Our list gathers five standouts, but if none of them fit the bill, you may find what you’re looking for among the honorable mentions at the end.
$79.00 More details about Ledger Nano S Plus:
Pros:
– Supports 5,500 altcoins
– Highly affordable
– Best available security system
– Mobile & desktop interfaces
Cons:
– Ledger Live may be less secure
Ledger offers a full line of cold wallet products, but the Nano S Plus stands above the crowd. It supports around 5,500 different coins plus NFTs and has a secure element chip that protects it against physical attacks. In addition, no Ledger wallet has ever been hacked. You can get the Nano S Plus for only $79.00, making it the best value on this list. Enthusiasts often tout the Ledger Nano X as the pinnacle of cold wallet technology, but we can’t recommend it as highly. Though it costs almost twice as much as the Nano S Plus, its only real advantage is Bluetooth. Connecting without having to plug the wallet in is nice, but it’s not worth the extra money. The Nano S Plus is more than powerful enough.
Ledger Live
Ledger Live is one of the Ledger line’s best features — though also one of the more controversial. It’s a mobile and desktop app bundled with every Ledger device and turns your cold wallet into a miniature crypto exchange. You can use Ledger Live to buy and sell crypto, access staking and crypto lending, and interface with NFT and Web3 markets (making Ledger a great choice for the metaverse). However, critics point out that while Ledger Live is open source, the firmware on physical Ledger wallets is not. They fear that making Ledger too connected will introduce the very vulnerabilities that cold storage wallets are supposed to counter.
Ledger Nano S Plus Crypto Hardware Wallet (Matte-Black) – Safeguard Your Crypto, NFTs and Tokens
$79.00
The concern is legitimate, but we still feel confident. No Ledger device has ever been hacked — while the company did suffer a security breach in 2020, the hackers only took user email addresses and didn’t get anywhere near any money. You can get a slice of that security for $79.00 with the Nano S Plus or $149.00 (Nano X) if you want Bluetooth.
$219.00 $179.00 Save $40.00 (18%) More details about Trezor Model T:
Pros:
– Multiple seed phrases protect against loss
– Completely open source
– Operated by touchscreen
Cons:
– Suite has no mobile app
– Supports fewer currencies
The Trezor Model One was the world’s first hardware wallet, launched in 2012. Today, the Model One is still available for $59.00. However, we can’t see any reason to choose it over the Ledger Nano S, given that the Nano S supports four times as many coins for just a few dollars more. If you want a real reason to choose Trezor over Ledger, look to the Model T. The standout feature of the Trezor Model T is its touchscreen, which new users will find much more familiar than the Ledger Nano’s LED interface. The touchscreen is used to confirm every single action. Like Ledger, Trezor comes with an app you can use to buy and sell cryptocurrency, but it doesn’t have a mobile app. It’s also less versatile, as it cannot work directly with as many DeFi markets as Ledger Live can.
Shamir Backup
The most unique feature of the Trezor Model T is Shamir Backup. Every crypto wallet comes with a recovery seed, which is a passphrase you can use to recover access if you lose your keys. However, one seed is a risky failure point, and losing it can lock you out of your account forever. Shamir Backup solves that problem by letting users generate up to 16 separate seeds and then select a threshold for the number needed to unlock the wallet. For example, you could generate three seeds, any two of which must be entered to unlock the account. That way…
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