Below you will find six precautions to manage your wallet and essential tips to manage your cryptocurrency portfolio safely.
Wallets are applications that allow you to send and receive cryptocurrencies from your phone or computer. In them, you can store your cryptos without giving up their custody and thus maintain control of your assets and privacy. Below we will present six precautions to manage your wallet; so you can manage your crypto assets more responsibly and securely.
INDEX
- choose wisely
- Set a password
- Do not reuse addresses!
- make a backup
- Be careful when importing your seed
- Take care of your secret codes.
Choose wisely
When choosing your wallet, you must bear in mind that the best alternatives will be those that do not require you to share control of your funds with a third party, so it is advisable to avoid options that only give you access to a virtual account guarded by a company. You should also consider which wallets have the best reputation in the cryptocurrency (or cryptocurrencies) communities to manage, as well as the frequency with which it is updated to receive improvements in their security and usability. In general, you should choose a wallet that suits you, that suits your needs as a user.
Set a password
Some wallets allow you to configure a password that will be required when authorizing payments with them. This option will be advantageous to prevent intruders from getting hold of your crypto. Keeping that in mind, the password you choose must be strong enough so that it cannot be guessed by another person, but easy to remember, because if you forget it you could find yourself in serious trouble.
Do not reuse addresses!
When you provide an address to someone to make a payment to you, that person will be able to query the blockchain to keep an eye on what other transactions are going in and out of the blockchain. For this reason, it is convenient for you to enter your wallet and generate a new address every time you need to receive payment; This will make it more complex to keep track of the payments you receive from other people. Using a new address for each payment will not incur any additional cost to you, so you can adopt this good privacy practice without losing money.
Make a backup
Most wallets provide you with a seed or list of security words (usually 12) that will serve as a backup of the contents of your wallet. These will allow you to generate the same wallet on any device in case you accidentally delete the app or its data. Write down those words in a safe place, preferably on paper, and, above all, prevent third parties from knowing what words and in what order make up your seed.
Be careful when importing your seed.
The seeds generated by some wallets are compatible with other wallets, so your backup may be able to access your crypto even if you use a different application. This can be a very useful feature, but you have to be very careful where you put those seeds. Avoid dubious apps and make sure you always download your wallets from an official store or website. That way you will avoid installing a modified version that steals your cryptos.
Take care of your secret codes.
Some wallets allow you to view and copy your private keys, that is, the codes that your wallet uses to sign the transactions with which you move your cryptos. Although exporting your private keys can be useful, you should take special care when doing so. Make sure not to expose them, as whoever owns them can claim your funds for themselves. Similarly, some wallets also allow you to export your “extended public key”, a code that allows you to calculate all the addresses in your wallet. You must also take care of it because if someone else obtains it, they will have access to the complete history of the payments you receive and make, negatively affecting your privacy.
Finally, we suggest you read The 3 best wallets to start using cryptocurrencies without complicating yourself so that you can compare these precautions with the usability and features you can find.
