Hardware wallets aren’t the only way to protect your crypto, but from ETFs and passkeys to multisig accounts, each alternative has its own risks and trade-offs.

After more than $200 million dollars worth of crypto was stolen in recent months from tampered Ledgers, and Coldcards where the seed generated wasn’t truly random, faith in hardware wallets has been shaken to the core.

These Bitcoin and crypto holders did everything right. They bought the products from official sources, correctly stored their seed phrases and they trusted in the phrase “not your keys, not your coins”, but they lost out any way. The thefts suggest that even the most diligent crypto holder using a hardware wallet faces risks beyond their control.

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.

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.

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