Moving to Cold Storage: The Complete Checklist
Eleven steps, in order. Skipping any of them is how the documented failures happened.
This is the procedure I follow and recommend. The order matters, and every step exists because skipping it has cost somebody their holdings.
Before the device arrives
1. Decide the amount. What portion of your holdings is long-term and will not be touched for months. That is what goes into cold storage. The rest stays liquid.
2. Order from the manufacturer. Not a marketplace, not a reseller. Tampered devices sold pre-initialised with an attacker’s phrase are a documented attack and the discount is not worth it.
On arrival
3. Check the packaging and the device state. A genuine device arrives uninitialised and generates a phrase in front of you. If a card with words is in the box, the device is compromised. Do not use it.
4. Update the firmware before anything else. Through the manufacturer’s official application only.
5. Generate the seed phrase on the device. Never accept a phrase from any other source.
6. Write it down by hand, legibly. Check each word against the screen as you write. Then read the whole thing back against the screen once more.
7. Decide about the passphrase. If you use one, document that a passphrase exists, stored separately from the phrase itself. If you do not understand exactly what it does, skip it on a first device.
Before funding
8. Restore-test. Wipe the device. Restore from the paper. Confirm the first receiving address matches what it showed before the wipe.
This is the step people skip and it is the one that catches transcription errors while they are still fixable.
9. Record the first receiving address alongside the phrase. It lets you verify any future restore instantly without funding anything.
Funding
10. Send a small test amount. Five or ten dollars. Confirm it arrives and appears in the device’s interface.
11. Send the rest, in one or two transactions. Verify the destination address on the device’s own screen, not on the computer. Check characters from the middle of the address, not just the ends.
Afterwards
Store the backup away from the device. A fire that takes the hardware should not take the only way to recover it.
Consider a second location for anything substantial. Home and a relative’s safe, so a single event does not take both.
Write the inheritance note. What exists, roughly how much, where the backup is, who can help, and step-by-step instructions for a non-technical reader. No secrets in this document, so it can be stored normally.
Set a review date. Once a year: confirm the backup is where you think it is, confirm you can still read it, confirm the inheritance note is current.
The three that get skipped
Steps 8, 9 and the inheritance note.
Every unrecoverable loss I have written up traces to one of them. The restore test is ten minutes. The address record is one line. The inheritance note is an evening.
Where the rest of the money goes
The liquid portion stays where buying happens, sized so that a platform failure would be an annoyance rather than an event. I use the exchange used for the withdrawal test for that tier and move surplus across quarterly rather than after every purchase, which keeps withdrawal costs down without leaving a large balance sitting anywhere.
Products covered here are bought at full retail price and used for real transactions before anything is written. There are no affiliate links on this site, no sponsored placements and no review units. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed at the top of the article.