Cryptotag Wallet Backup Review

It took me a while to get to this review, simply because my CryptoTag Zeus had been lying unopened for a while as I was rather busy over the last few months. BUT, I finally managed to block out some time to back up my wallet (a very important thing to do if you are serious about keeping your wallet safe), and now, here’s a review and my thoughts around the entire process of using the CryptoTag Zeus starter kit.

In fact, I’d been sitting on it for a month, and it wasn’t until I received a follow-up email from Cryptotag asking if I enjoyed using it, that I was jolted to action.

What is Cryptotag and how does it work?

Cryptotag is a metal based seed phrase backup product. When you get a ledger to use as a hardware wallet, you’re typically given a piece of paper to store your 12 or 24 word recovery phrase.

This makes it susceptible to damage of all kinds. Water damage, fire damage, even a pet eating up the piece of paper damage. Not to mention your clueless spouse could be clearing out the closet one day, and casually tosses it, thinking it’s a useless piece of paper that has gibberish on it.

Cryptotag solves this problem by letting you store your recovery phrase on a 6mm thick bullet proof titanium slabs. Now, your recovery words are fire-proof, water-proof and pretty much tamper-proof.

There’s an added layer of encryption by using bip39 word list, transforming your recovery phrases into a bunch of 4-digit codes.

What’s in the box?

When you first open the box, you’re greeted with an instruction manual (also containing the bip32 word list and corresponding numbers), the pair of titanium plates together with 2 locking clips, and a puncher.

Inside the instruction manual, there’s a slip of paper for you to write down your recovery words, along with its corresponding bip32 number. This is for you to temporarily record it down, so you can get to work punching the numbers on to the plates.

As you remove the titanium plates, you’re greeted with this:

They have thoughtfully included earplugs (the punching does make a loud sound, and if you’re securing a 24-word recovery, that’s 96 times you’ll need to punch numbers) and a box of matches for you to burn the evidence after.

Nice.

How did I find the experience of using it?

The quality and build of the cryptotag was really solid, customer service was top notch (they actually emailed a followup), and overall, the instructions were extremely clear, and the process of punching the numbers was not as exhausting as I thought it might be.

There’s always been a nagging thought about entrusting access to my crypto assets lying on a piece of flimsy paper.

The other options are to trust the centralised exchanges (probably a little.. but not the entire stash), or to commit the recovery words to memory (definitely not a great idea).

So, having a metal backup seems to make very logical sense. I’m feeling pretty good about it, using a combination of ledger and CryptoTag Zeus to manage and backup my crypto funds.