Trezor, Ledger, and other hardware wallets are a convenient, safe way to manage your crypto assets, especially for everyday spending. But when planning long-term storage, figuring out how to ensure your heirs will have access to your crypto in the event that something happens to you, or protecting against risks like natural disasters, they can fall short.
Here’s a few situations where a TC vault would work better than a Trezor or Ledger
- You want to ensure your assets can pass safely to your loved ones in the event of your death or incapacitation
- You want to backup your assets to protect against accidental loss, natural disaster, and other contingencies
- You want to store secrets aside from crypto like documents or cryptos not supported by these products. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could store all your important secrets in one place and not have to be constantly switching between them?
Natural Disaster and Accidental Loss
One thing we must consider is that a hardware wallet can fail at any time. Nothing lasts forever. So you’ll probably want some combination of backing up your seed phrase and having multiple hardware wallets. This is easy to do, but what happens if your house burns down? Or there’s a flood or other natural disaster? You’ll need a safe place to make off-site backups, but how can you do that with something as sensitive as a seed phrase?
Backing Up Your Seed Phrase
One key aspect often overlooked by people buying hardware wallets is that they must keep a copy and backups of their seed phrase. If they lose the seed phrase, they lose access to the contents of the wallet. But where is a safe place to keep something like that, let alone make backup copies? After all, anybody with the seed phrase can steal your crypto.
You may completely trust somebody, like a family member, and give them the entire seed phrase, but storing that information will be a burden to them. They may worry that they are storing it incorrectly. What happens if their computer is hacked or their house is broken into? What about an untrustworthy contractor on the property, are you sure they won’t make a copy for themselves?
Of course, you could be clever and try to split up the seed phrase into parts, but anybody with access to a third of the seed phrase, for example, is a third closer to guessing the whole phrase. And what if they lose their third, now you have an incomplete backup! Unlike backups you store yourself, you cannot readily verify that the backup is in-tact and ready to use. They may have put it in a drawer and forgotten where they put it by the time you need it.
A TC vault enables you to backup your seed phrase, documents, and other secrets to as many parties as you want, and having part of the phrase doesn’t get them any closer to the whole thing. You set the number of parts required to make the whole (threshold). This enables you to have security and redundancy. A few missing parts won’t stop the whole seed phrase from being re-assembled.
Supply-Chain Attacks
Hardware wallets are premised on being able to trust the supplier of the hardware wallet. Because these companies specialize in making hardware for protecting crypto, it makes them a major target for supply-chain attacks. If their supply chain is compromised, or they change their policies in an unexpected way (as they have done in the past), it can jeopardize your crypto. Most of the wallets are closed-source, meaning their security cannot be audited as nobody can view the source code. TC Vaults are built using battle-tested, open-source software which has been audited many times over. Our systems are built using off-the-shelf hardware, protecting you from supply-chain attacks. If our hardware is compromised in a supply-chain attack, so is every computer on the market. And since TC vaults are offline by default, in the unlikely event that such a supply-chain attack occurs, those other computers will be exploited first and act as a “canary in a coalmine” while your crypto remains safely offline.
Online Attacks
One of the major risks of hardware wallets comes from their intended use case: As a way to easily spend your crypto. Every time you connect your hardware wallet to your computer, you risk that a virus or other malicious actor may exploit a vulnerability in the wallet. A TC vault protects against this and many other attacks by being offline by default.
| TC Vault | Hardware wallet | |
| Stores crypto? | ✅ | ✅ |
| Works with all cryptos? | ✅ | ❌ |
| Stores passwords, documents, and other secrets? | ✅ | ❌ |
| Safe to store copies of vault with third parties? | ✅ | ❌ |
| Vault can be stored with as many parties as you want without increasing risk? | ✅ | ❌ |
| Vault can be stored in a redundant fashion so that any set of X can be lost without consequence? | ✅ | ❌ |
| Open-source and auditable? | ✅ | ❌ |
| Provides a way to pass on your crypto assets to heirs? | ✅ | ❌ |
| Looks like? | An ordinary laptop | A device specifically for storing crypto |