Move Your Assets
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain when it’s appropriate to recover assets using your recovery phrase.
- Explain the importance of moving assets and how to do this securely
The Scenario—Move Assets from a Hot Wallet to a Cold Wallet
In Web3: Self-Custody and Digital Ownership, Ledger explains the difference between a hot (software based) wallet and cold (hardware based) wallet, and the previous unit goes a step further explaining how cold wallets help secure your crypto assets.
Let’s say you’ve been using a hot wallet to secure your blockchain assets. Some time has passed, and you now want to move these assets to a cold wallet to increase security. Understanding how to securely move assets between wallets is crucial to staying safe.
Explore How to Use Your Recovery Phrase
Let’s go back a step. When you create a crypto wallet, the first thing you receive is your recovery phrase. The private keys for everything you store on your wallet are derived from that recovery phrase.
Sounds easy enough. If you want to move your existing crypto assets, just use your existing recovery phrase with the hardware wallet, right? But hang on just a second. It’s not that simple. You’d defeat the entire purpose of using a hardware wallet, if you do so.
Once Online, Always Online
The entire premise of a hardware wallet is that it keeps your private keys completely offline. But the device can’t protect keys that were already exposed. For example, keys generated on an always-online hot wallet interface. So using your seed phrase to recover hot wallet keys means the cold wallet can’t protect your assets—you don’t know who has already seen those keys, or even the seed phrase itself. Doing this may well recover your existing blockchain assets, but it won’t secure them.
In the digital age, once something goes online, it stays there. Your seed phrase and private keys are no different.
Secure Your Hot Wallet Assets
If you’re looking to move your assets from a hot wallet to a cold wallet, this is critical: move, don’t merge.
Start a fresh account on your hardware wallet for each of your assets, and send each one over into its new account. This is the only way to be sure both your keys and seed phrase you’re using have never been compromised. This process might take time—and cost some gas fees—but it is absolutely worthwhile, as it is the only way to be absolutely sure your assets are safe.
With this done, you can switch the hot wallet off and be absolutely certain your assets are untouchable.
When to Recover Your Wallet
So when should you use the recovery function for your wallet?
You may be using your cold device as a back-up for an existing hardware wallet, for example. In this case, it’s safe to use your seed phrase (provided you haven’t exposed it yourself by saving it on a connected device) to recover your accounts onto a new wallet, because neither the phrase itself nor any of the related private keys have ever been online.