How To Backup Your Crypto Private Keys 🗝

You may have heard the phrase, not your keys not your crypto. The reason being that as long as you have access to your private keys or seed phrases - you can literally access your crypto anywhere in the world.

🥳 Subscribe for more 2 Minute Crypto Explainer Videos 🥳 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTFesG4nhqr4vHH6JsBdRYA

BUT that also means that if you LOSE your private keys - you lose access to your accounts. So on one hand you want to backup them for your own sake to make sure you don’t lose access to your funds - but you also want to make sure you do it in a safe, and secure way because if someone ELSE gets access to your keys, let’s say through some kind of hack or phishing scam… then they can get access to your funds super fast before you even know what’s happening.

To start off we are going to talk about online safety - and then jump into how to create offline backups for your keys.

If you store these private keys in any way online - ONLY ever use an encrypted password manager. Here are a couple examples of things you do NOT want to do online. #1 -If a browser pop up asks if you want to save your password in the browser… always ALWAYS say no. #2 - do NOT save your private keys or seed phrases in a google doc, notes app, or anything that is not encrypted. #3 - never save this information by emailing it to yourself, or taking a screenshot of it. These are all literally terrible ideas.

Okay so now that we’ve talked about digital safety … let’s talk about creating offline backups - which is really the heart of this video. There are varying levels of security you can employ - but the easiest thing you can do is simply write it down on a sheet of paper and store it in a safe place. To make sure you don’t have any typos - you may want to write them down a few times. Now paper isn’t totally ideal because you could literally spill water on it and ruin them - so I actually like using waterproof and tear-proof paper instead and then put THAT into a fireproof document bag or safe. I personally like using my Shieldfolio for this!

Now if you want to go next level you can actually imprint this information into stainless steel - as steel can withstand pretty much any natural disaster or unfortunate event that may occur. Crypto-Keys is a great stainless steel backup option and was actually top-rated in the Lopp stress test.

There are more advanced levels of security you can implement such as multi-sig authorizations with someone like Casa and maybe i’ll break those down in a future video …

But at a minimum - I hope you at least decide to do a sweep of your digital footprint and make sure you don’t have ANY vulnerabilities such as emailing your keys or taking a photo of them and I hope that you’ll take a few minutes ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmMqcKOJprM