How to keep your money safe when buying a cold wallet: six simple steps

Reddit user the_far_yard shared a secret about what to do with a cold wallet after buying it. With simple actions that you should make a good habit of, you will increase the safety of your funds and reduce the possibility of losing them. Here’s what to do.

What’s the secret?

Now it is much easier to buy a cold wallet than before. Services like eBay and Amazon have gone by the wayside to buy the device on dozens of sites. However, at the same time, the number of fraud instances and counterfeit products has increased. To avoid coming across a fake or, even worse, malicious device, you should be careful and buy only from trusted vendors. Also, these tips will help you. Do it immediately after purchasing a cold wallet: 

1. Reset the device.

2. Get the seed phrases from the device.
3. Write down the seed phrases offline. We reported the best (and worst) places to store it.
4. Do a test transfer using a coin of your choice with low fees for transferring.
5. Reset the device AGAIN.
6. Now, enter the seed phrases you wrote to ensure it’s working. This also serves as a practice when you have to recover your wallet when you have to change your cold wallet in due time.
7. Does it work? Is your coin there? OK. Great! That’s your seed phrase; you now know how to recover your cold wallet.

the_far_yard says that this rule might seem common sense, but a lot more people should do this at least once for their own sake.

How that can help you

According to the author, he got his Ledger Nano back in 2017, and the crypto market fell to a point where he saw his coins losing their value by about 90%. After that, the_far_yard chucked away his cold wallet and didn’t use it for three years. When the market started to rise in late 2020, he tried to recover it — only to find out the screen was dimming to a point where he couldn’t see the letters on the screen anymore. 

“I had to get a new cold wallet. I got myself the Ledger Nano X. Neat, but here’s the trial by fire- it was time for me to try and use my seed phrases to recover my wallet. If it weren’t for the tips the other fellow Redditor taught me, I would have been much more anxious,” — he said. 

So, the author is sure that by performing these six steps, you can be confident that you have the keys and some relief because now you know what to do to recover your wallet. 

Also, for Ledger users, they can do a Recovery Check which requires: 

• to install the recovery check;
• start the recovery process to confirm the recovery phrase.

But it will be easier and more reliable to reset the device to ensure you know how to recover it properly. To choose a reliable wallet (and it doesn’t have to be cold), you can refer to our recent article.