With the number of physical attacks on crypto holders rising — there’s been a $5 wrench attack in France every 2.5 days this year — the drawbacks of storing crypto on a hardware wallet are becoming clearer.
And that’s even before you consider how many crypto owners have lost wallets and seed phrases over the years — “boating accidents” for tax purposes excluded
There are plenty of drawbacks with all of the alternative methods of holding crypto however, so spreading your stack across different addresses and via different methods will at least minimize the damage if any one method is compromised. Here are five alternatives for storing your crypto. The first and most important caveat to this hardware wallet alternative is that it isn’t technically a way to store crypto at all.
Even if you deposit Bitcoin directly, it is exchanged for shares in a financial product that holds crypto assets through a custodian. You end up with a claim on the ETF’s net asset value in dollars, not in Bitcoin. So there are trade offs.