A little over a year ago I was approached by a polish guy named Wojtek who said he was looking to create the most durable cold wallet possible. He was a metal artist and he thought about using this skill in order to create some form of wallet that couldn’t be destroyed.
The idea would be to keep your private keys or mnemonic phrase inside some sort of metal casing that will be resistant to any catastrophe that may occur – a flood, a fire, an earthquake, you name it. In order to raise the funds for this project he started a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, and a few months later he was fully funded, Cryptosteel was on its way to becoming a reality.
I have to admit that Cryptosteel’s vision seemed very compelling, and the video created for the product illustrated it extremely well:
However, as with many crowdfunding campaigns this project too has seen many obstacles. The product had some unforeseen delays. From manufacturing issues, to postal issues it seemed that a lot of things were preventing Cryptosteel from becoming a reality. However throughout all of these Wojtek kept close contact with his initial investors and made sure that they were up to date. And indeed one year later I’ve received my own Cryptosteel in the mail.
I’m going to start out with the “normal” review and then move on to the fun part – trying to destroy the Cryptosteel 🙂
The product itself is pretty self explanatory, you get a metal plate and a set of numbers and letters to create either your private key or mnemonic seed (to be used with TREZOR).
I must admit it took me a few minutes to understand how to actually open the metal plate in order to enter the letter and numbers, but it’s nothing that 5 minutes and a few hits with a screwdriver wouldn’t solve.
The annoying part is definitely inserting the letters into the Cryptosteel. It took me about 40 seconds for each letter and it didn’t go smoothly to say the least. However, considering that this is (hopefully) a one time process it’s something I can live with.
Also, I’ve gotten enough letters and numbers to create even 2 mnemonic seeds or private keys, so way to go redundancy!
And now for the fun part….
Since there’s not much more to say about the product I thought why not have a little fun with it and see if it’s actually indestructible. So I went out and conducted a few tests…
Overall I’d say the Cryptosteel wallet is one pretty solid cold wallet. However it may be a bit of an overkill. If however, you’re storing large amounts of Bitcoins this is a good additional insurance measure to take at a reasonable price ($49).
At the moment you can only get Cryptosteel through the Indiegogo campaign or as a complementary product when you buy a TREZOR. If you already own a TREZOR this is actually a great product to have for additional protection of your mnemonic seed.
If you own a Cryptosteel and tried to destroy it as well or have some other comments about the product I’d love to hear them in the comment section below.
