Paper wallet

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Revision as of 16:03, 11 May 2018 by Nad (talk | contribs) (The procedure)

Storing Crypto-currency in a paper wallet is one of the simplest ways to hold your savings securely, but you should follow some important steps to be sure that you can truly be confident in its security. A paper wallet is a way of keeping your assets safe by having the only way to access them written on a piece of paper so that they're safe against hackers, theft or mechanical failure. This procedure is a way of using the popular Exodus multi-asset wallet software as a secure paper wallet consisting of a single twelve word phrase which can secure a wide variety of different crypto-currencies.

Since the twelve word phrase we create allows access to the savings within it, we want to be very certain that it has not been seen by any hackers or mal-ware, so it should be created and written down while the computer is offline, and further more should be created from within an operating system that has never been online before. To do this we'll be using a Linux operating system booted live from a USB stick.

One small complication is that Exodus does not natively give access to the twelve word backup phrase until after some funds have been sent to the wallet. They've done it like this to make their backup procedure much more friendly and easy to follow safely for beginners, but it's no good for creating a secure paper wallet. Fortunately there's a simple way around this - any source of twelve word phrase will do, as long as they conform to the BIP-39 protocol.

What you'll need

The procedure

  • Disconnect your computer from the network and reboot into the live Linux OS on the USB stick.
  • Insert the other USB stick and run both Exodus and the BIP-39 seed generator, and also open a text editor.
  • In the seed generator page, select 12 for the number of words and click "Generate", then write down the resulting twelve words and also select them and CTRL+C them ready to paste.
  • In Exodus click "restore from 12 word phrase", it will then restart and allow you to paste the twelve words in that you copied in the previous step.
  • Wait for the recovery to complete which may take about five minutes (even though we're offline, it still takes a while since it keeps trying to connect).
  • Select "wallet", go to all the asset types you care about and paste their receive addresses into the text editor you opened (noting down what asset type each address is).
  • Open the developer menu (CTRL+SHOFT+D) and select "Export Safe Report Data". The Safe Report is a read-only backup you can use to check on your savings safely
  • Save the text in the text editor to a file on the USB stick, and copy the Safe Report from the exports folder on the desktop to the USB stick as well
  • Remove the bootable USB, reboot into your normal OS and reconnect the net.
  • That's it! You can now send assets to the addresses you noted down.

Accessing the assets

To check the balances of the coins in a safe read-only way you can run Exodus and import the safe-report zip file you exported, note that this will over-right any existing data in Exodus. The safe report allows you to easily keep track of the balances of all the assets in your paper wallet, and even to obtain public addresses of other assets in the same wallet you may wish to send coins to that you didn't initially make a note of.

To spend the coins, you'll need to run Exodus and recover from the twelve word phrase - but note that you would have then compromised the security of your paper wallet, so once you do this it would be best to create another paper wallet and send the remaining funds to it.