So much for Coinbase

I’ve been dabbling in the crypto space for the last several years at the urging of a friend of mine. I have no stomach for the volatility of trading. I’m a buy-and-HODL person. So, I’ve purchased BTC and ETH with a sprinkling of other minor crypto thrown in, and don’t forget BAT generated from the Brave browser.

Now that we’ve had the big meltdown, I started paying more attention to what’s going on. I’ve heard people discuss the idea of storing your crypto offline in a hardware wallet. This method is recommended over keeping your crypto on an exchange or even an independent software wallet. When I read the stories about how if Coinbase goes under, your crypto stored on their exchange may suddenly disappear, that’s all it took for me to get in gear on a hardware solution.

I found a hardware wallet on the Trezor site. This one seems to be pretty well-reviewed, and at the advice of one of the reviewers, I bought it directly from the company to avoid any third-party shenanigans. The Mac software worked like a charm as I set up the wallet. It created a backup by generating a seed of a bunch of words that have to be input in a specific order. I then used the addresses of my wallets to send the crypto I have stored on the Coinbase exchange. After I passed the identity verification, my crypto was transferred.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought, and now I know my crypto is safe and sound as paltry as the value is at the moment.