Aakash K | Devcon, Mumbai

Our hardware wallet can stay 100% offline and still get drained before we even use it. This month, buyers who ordered sealed hardware wallets from a reseller found a tiny spy chip hidden inside the plastic case. The wallet's security chip wasn't even hacked. The hidden part just waited for the user to set up the wallet, read the 24-word seed phrase off the screen as they wrote it down, and sent those words to the attackers. Most of us miss where the real risk in self-custody actually sits: 1) Our 12 or 24-word seed phrase is the master key, whoever gets it controls our crypto from any where 2)Over 80% of wallets aren't lost to hackers cracking code; they leak through a gallery photo, a cloud backup, a fake support DM on Telegram or WhatsApp, or a bad firmware update 3) if you buy from third-party sellers (which is super common in India and South Asia), any extra part inside a wallet - a screen, battery, USB port, or hollow case- gives someone a place to tamper with it before it reaches you 3 things you should check on your setup tonight: 1) never use a wallet that arrives already set up or with a seed phrase printed in the box 2) never save your recovery words in a photo, phone note, or cloud drive 3) remember that more hardware parts mean more places to hide a bug so what happens if you remove the seed phrase and the extra parts completely? that's how @Tangem works: seedless by design: your private key is created offline inside a bank-grade chip and never leaves it, no 24 words shown on a screen, nothing to write down or steal just a solid card or ring: no screen to tap, no hollow case to hide a spy chip inside, no battery, no USB cables, and no bluetooth physical backups: you tap 2 or 3 cards to your phone during setup and they link up as backups, no paper needed locked against tampering: the firmware cannot be altered and the Tangem app checks that your card is genuine and warns you if it was ever activated before it reached your hands No wallet removes every risk (keep your backup cards in separate places, because losing all of them means nobody can recover your wallet), but removing the seed phrase removes the biggest target in crypto. Explore @Tangem: tangem.com/ Code for 10% off: tangem.com/invite/5XNVLS #Tangem #SelfCustody #CryptoSecurity