Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is advising people to “decentralize their own security” after weighing in on a Twitter debate about using cold wallets.
To prove his point, Buterin said he stores 90% of his crypto assets in a multisig safe wallet.
“M-of-N, some keys are held by you (but not enough to prevent recovery), others are held by others you trust,” he said. wrote. “Don't reveal who other people are, even to each other.”
The “m-of-n” mentioned by Buterin describes one way to set up a multisig (multi-signature) wallet. The first variable refers to the minimum number of signatures required to sign the contract, i.e. the expenditure or transfer of funds from the wallet. The second variable refers to the total number of signers that may exist in the wallet.
The conversation started after a developer and a researcher (pseudonyms). 0xkofi On Twitter, he urged crypto traders to think about how bad it would be to lose all their money and avoid it by investing in cold storage.
“Your hardware wallet will become your fortress of solitude,” Coffey wrote. “It allows you to sleep peacefully at night. It protects you so you can survive long enough to win this game.”
However, not everyone believes it is the right way to protect personal crypto assets. Peter Watts, CEO of Uneven Labs and founder of Reservoir, a developer platform for launching NFT collections, highlighted the risks associated with relying on hardware wallets.
“When using a hardware wallet, your biggest risk is to yourself,” he wrote, noting that someone could find your hidden private seed phrase, or that you've kept it too secure that you can't retrieve it yourself. He added that it is sexual.
At the time, Buterin explained how they ensure that cold storage wallet security is not a single point of failure.
Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe) multisig wallets are often treated as products that help DAOs and other groups manage shared finances, but there are also many individuals who use them in ways similar to Buterin.
“handToday, individuals account for more than 99% of S.Afe Users including famous users like Vitalik Buterin and Punk6529,” wrote a known SafeDAO contributor and representative. Daniel On Twitter.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
