Hardware Wallet while Trading Crypto?

[Ankith K Shetty]

I am wondering how people have so much money on exchange wallets without anxiety killing them. Is there a way to trade by using hardware wallet. I understand that its pain in the ass.

 

[Fakker]

Very few and very limited.
Glad you asked, as I am in hardware crypto devices since 15+ years and it’s good to see people asking these questions.

Motto is “Software security is soft security”.
Keys on software might be compromised relatively easy, hardware is tamper proof and has hardware RNG to make sure the generated keys are not easy to reverse engineer.

I see this need is not perceived so strong, so thanks for having raised the problem.

 

[Deleted member 1333509]

I am wondering how people have so much money on exchange wallets without anxiety killing them. Is there a way to trade by using hardware wallet. I understand that its pain in the ass.

If you trade in a decentralized way you can retain custody on a HWW but also trade freely whenever you want without needing to make transfers or give away custody.

The risk then moves from hackers or the trading platform, to the strength of the smart contracts your HWW is interacting with. If they are audited by top-tier auditors like Certik (bit dubious nowadays actually), Trail of Bits or Quantstamp, then you can sleep well knowing that as as well as safely making money from trading using defi platforms, you can also stake your assets in a safe way and make money while you're sleeping too.

Outside of Binance, wouldn't trust any centralized platform with more than 5% of capital for more than an hour or two, and only Binance bc of Safu Fund, nothing more.

 

[Fakker]

If you trade in a decentralized way you can retain custody on a HWW but also trade freely whenever you want without needing to make transfers or give away custody.

The risk then moves from hackers or the trading platform, to the strength of the smart contracts your HWW is interacting with. If they are audited by top-tier auditors like Certik (bit dubious nowadays actually), Trail of Bits or Quantstamp, then you can sleep well knowing that as as well as safely making money from trading using defi platforms, you can also stake your assets in a safe way and make money while you're sleeping too.

Wherever there’sa key, my friend, it can be compromised as sooner or later, even for a very short lapse of time, it will be in clear text in RAM.

I’m with you that, even if you can HW secure your wallet, the tons of ways you can make money depends on how these systems protect their keys and therefore your assets.

 

[Deleted member 1333509]

Wherever there’sa key, my friend, it can be compromised as sooner or later, even for a very short lapse of time, it will be in clear text in RAM.

I’m with you that, even if you can HW secure your wallet, the tons of ways you can make money depends on how these systems protect their keys and therefore your assets.

Yeah look, I try to use logic as much as possible when I don't know things for sure. One good example is me being dumb as a rock when it comes to understanding the fundamentals of whether a Trezor or Ledger can be hacked. I have no idea tbh and don't understand the tech outside of a fairly surface level understanding of mechanisms like cryptographic hashing.

So I fall back on what makes common sense to me.

Logically, neither have had their encryption ever breached afaik, irrespective of the HUGE rewards for hackers to be able to do so, including state actors like North Korean hackers who seem to be able to hack plenty of financial institutions and products.

So my way of seeing it is that with years of battle testing and never having a breach of the core security within hardware wallets, I'm comfortable placing what I would consider to be significant capital in them and feeling safer than any comparative option. Still, pretty much anything can be hacked, so it's a case of minimising than chance as much as possible.

 

[Fakker]

Yeah look, I try to use logic as much as possible when I don't know things for sure. One good example is me being dumb as a rock when it comes to understanding the fundamentals of whether a Trezor or Ledger can be hacked. I have no idea tbh and don't understand the tech outside of a fairly surface level understanding of mechanisms like cryptographic hashing.

So I fall back on what makes common sense to me.

Logically, neither have had their encryption ever breached afaik, irrespective of the HUGE rewards for hackers to be able to do so, including state actors like North Korean hackers who seem to be able to hack plenty of financial institutions and products.

So my way of seeing it is that with years of battle testing and never having a breach of the core security within hardware wallets, I'm comfortable placing what I would consider to be significant capital in them and feeling safer than any comparative option. Still, pretty much anything can be hacked, so it's a case of minimising than chance as much as possible.

Agreed.

The detail that it’s not easy to pick immediately is that at some point there is no crypto to break.

When an application needs to use a key, that crypto key is in clear text in the RAM.
Which is not designed to be tamperproof.
Maybe for 4ms, maybe less, but it’s in clear text.

Sure there are other measures that prevent to get to that point, so that’s why it never happened (as far as public domain knows) but for example in digital signature there are many regulatory compliance that enforce the use of hardware security modules to secure the storage of signature key.

Not saying we should panic, but it’s something we should think of and I feel HWW will be more popular in the coming years.

 

[Ashway]

The biggest reason is they can't just sit idle and hold their coins. there's an itch to trade which hardware wallet makes cumbersome, also don't forget the fee that you might incur while transfer from wallet to exchange

 

[CoderFromHell]

Ordered mine 2 weeks ago for that exact reason. My crypto touching 5 digits I’m like I gotta store this shit ASAP.

 

[godknowseverything]

Ordered mine 2 weeks ago for that exact reason. My crypto touching 5 digits I’m like I gotta store this shit ASAP.

Which product did you order? I am looking to buy one

 

[Fakker]

Ordered mine 2 weeks ago for that exact reason. My crypto touching 5 digits I’m like I gotta store this shit ASAP.

Great move.
I also fail to see how NFT market will not start using HW soon too.

 

[tb303]

I am wondering how people have so much money on exchange wallets without anxiety killing them. Is there a way to trade by using hardware wallet. I understand that its pain in the ass.

You can connect a Ledger device to metamask and trade directly on Uniswap - if you can stick the ETH fee's. When a transaction is created it is sent to the ledger device where it is signed with the private key before being sent back to metamask for transmission. The key never leaves the device.

Its also possible to set metamask up to use the Binance smart chain and link that to your ledger before trading on pancakeswap for much lower fees. Currently the BSC integration in metamask is not the best and I dont think you cant see the BEC20 tokens in ledger live yet. But as BSC is pretty much a copy paste of ETH it works with the same addresses and keys. The ledger wallet is fine for this we just need gui updates for metamask and ledger live.

 

[CoderFromHell]

Which product did you order? I am looking to buy one

Ledger Nano X

 

[xioyter]

Ledger Nano X

Thanks. Are there any other products you can recommend?

 

[CoderFromHell]

Thanks. Are there any other products you can recommend?

I’m completely new to Hard Wallets myself, their aren’t any other products I know much about.