Why You Need To Secure Your Crypto Wallets In This Bear Market

The number of people investing in various crypto assets is growing daily. There is always a more sporadic interest sometimes than at other times. Enormous interest over a short period can drive the price of top crypto assets to gain three or more times their value, known as the bull run. Otherwise, the bear run is caused by people who have invested in crypto assets selling their assets, causing the market to crash. 

We are officially in a bear run primarily caused by the crash of LUNA. In these trying times in the crypto world, many investors are selling their crypto assets by cashing out in stable coins or selling off their holdings for US dollars and have promised themselves never to invest in crypto assets again. Now that you have decided to keep your crypto assets, you’ll need to learn how you can survive the bear market, and the most important thing to understand is how to secure your crypto wallets. 

What happens during bear markets

Bitcoin was the first crypto that was available. Bitcoin was created shortly after the stock market crash of 2008. Anonymous man Satoshi Nakamoto created permissionless decentralized money using blockchain technology. His innovation eliminated intermediaries like banks and financial institutions. The popularity of his blockchain network over the next few years gave birth to other cryptos created using the technology in other different ways, and one of those currencies was Ethereum.

Crypto exchanges began to emerge

The development of other cryptos gave birth to an entirely new market known as cryptocurrency trading. Traders were looking for ways to trade their crypto tokens with other tokens of the US dollar for profit. During that time, many exchanges started emerging with the promise that they would help traders hold their coins in centralized wallets when they traded. Still, the market has become wider that people are now using decentralized exchanges primarily to buy and store their wallets, and you shouldn’t do that. 

Why exchanges might go bankrupt

The 2018 bear market taught us one of the most powerful market lessons about the bull market. The development in the crypto ecosystem in 2017 drove interest in the crypto market, which led to an increase in the price of Bitcoin to an all-time high of around $20,000. This period of hype quickly was followed by a period of lack of interest in the next nine months, during which the price of Bitcoin fell to around $3,000. The cause of this crash was crypto companies emerging during the bull run that were raising money through ICOs failed to live up to their hype.

During the hype period, many crypto companies were the best-managed companies because they had enough cash to pump into various expansion projects, which means they hired more staff and had more running costs. Many of them couldn’t even imagine that there would be a crash in the price of cryptos again. The 2018 crash surprised those companies, and many investors lost all their savings because they trusted various exchanges with their coins. The current bear run will also be unveiled in the same way; many exchanges will not have enough cash to run their ecosystem, which will lead to a total loss of assets to investors that have trusted them. 

Not your keys, not your coins

Entrusting your crypto wallets to the hands of exchanges could be dangerous because they don’t give you access to your private keys, which means you are not in total control of your coins. The exchange goes to a centralized wallet and pulls out your coins whenever you request to withdraw your coins, just like how banks work. To be in total control, you need to use a wallet that will give you access to your private keys; it requires extra care.

How to secure your crypto assets

Types of crypto wallets are divided into two cold and hot wallets. Cold wallets are connected to the internet, meaning transitions can be completed as fast as possible and pose a risk of being hacked. For example, cold wallets are crypto exchange wallets. Cold wallets allow your funds to be stored outside the internet, but your funds are lost forever when you misplace your cold wallet device.

Crypto wallet best practices 

The first and the most important thing is to check every link before clicking them. Many websites are laden with malware that can be used to hack into your crypto wallet. Internet fraudsters also use phishing methods to lure people into dropping their details into replica websites which is the most common with arbitrage scams and fake giveaways. Use a strong password, secure the internet, and don’t store your password in any Google accounts to avoid your password being stolen. Use the password that you can remember to ensure that you do not lose your assets due to complacency. 

Ambire is one of the companies that offers users an easy way to protect themselves by providing them with a user wallet launched as a web application. This browser extension gives users access to their private keys. Ambire is open source, and it is well secured. Ambire supports Hardware wallets like Trezor and dApp through wallet connect and built-in swaps on Multiple networks such as Ethereum and Polygon. Ambire wallet also allows Multiple keys to be used on the same account. 

Securing your cryptos during the bear market takes a lot of hard work and determination. Still, first, you have to understand that the first step in securing your wallet is to ensure that you are in total control of your private keys, and you need to keep the best security practices to ensure that your cryptos are secured for the next bull run.

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