Storage Contracts
This free utility is for everyone who was ever concerned about losing their funds to hacks or scams.
If you have been in the crypto space for a while, you probably also know a friend or two who has lost some money before. Either they connected their wallet to a scam/phishing site, they downloaded some malware onto their PC, or their wallets got drained in any of the other dozen possible ways.
Some might say it's best to hold your funds on an exchange. Others might say a hardware/cold wallet like a Ledger is the most secure way. In our opinion, a simple contract beats them all. We have recommended this to many friends for years and never had a single one of them lose any funds!
Exchange | Disadvantages
Exchanges like Binance are more secure than any browser extension like MetaMask. However, the problem is that as soon as your funds are on an exchange, you basically lose control of your money.
You might know the crypto-phrase 'Not your keys, not your coins' and this is totally true. In reality, even though the funds officially belong to you, the exchange can basically decide to block your account and the access to your funds whenever they want.
Short story time: I also used to have a good share of my portfolio on Binance. One day, there was apparently a new law from my country, which led Binance to ask for a bunch of additional info, including a source of wealth income report and more. This wouldn't be too bad in general if they hadn't frozen my whole account until the documents were submitted and approved. The provided documents were even declined twice before they were finally accepted the third time!
End of the story: For almost 3 months!!! I basically lost access to my funds. Trades were disabled, withdrawals were disabled... I was afraid I might never get access to my funds again at all. During that time, we also got a mini bull run of +50% on ETH, BTC, etc. I would've taken some profits at that point, but because the funds were frozen, I wasn't able to do so. By the time I got access to my funds again, the market was already down to the initial prices, leaving me with no profits at all.
Some of you might also remember the whole story about the FTX bankruptcy. There is always the possibility of an exchange filing bankruptcy. FTX also disabled withdrawals during that time. So just because you own any money on an exchange doesn't necessarily guarantee that you will always be able to withdraw it again.
Hardware Wallet | Disadvantages
Everyone who doesn't hold their funds in an exchange will probably tell you next that hardware or cold wallets like Ledger's are the most secure way to store your funds. Again, while they are way more secure than just a simple browser wallet like MetaMask, they still have some drawbacks.
Companies like Ledger aren't safe against hackers either. They had leaks in the past as well, and according to this article, the personal information of over 270,000 customers, including phone numbers and physical addresses (delivery addresses), got leaked. Would you still feel safe if a hacker had your personal physical address, knowing that there might be a ledger wallet with a potential fortune waiting for them at your home?
Another point is that even though it's a hardware wallet, it's still just a seed phrase and private keys. If people somehow get access to them, your money is gone. Buying a cold wallet (especially from any other site than the original company) always comes with the risk that the device was manipulated in some way. So someone might have access to your wallet's data already before you even get it.
Also, you should not forget that all electronic devices can break. Not only would you have to pay for a new hardware wallet, but you would also go through a lot of trouble to restore your wallets. Let's not even mention the time it will take before you are able to access your funds again.
If you travel a lot, this can be another big disadvantage. You could either lose your hardware wallet while traveling or have no access at all if left at home because you thought you might not need it.
The last point we want to mention is the price. Most hardware wallets cost like $80 - $150. For people with a small portfolio, this often isn't even worth the price. So, even though a hardware wallet might be arguably more secure, the fact that it can save you up to $150 on most chains might be reason enough for some crypto beginners with a small portfolio to use our storage contracts instead.
Storage Contract | Advantages
Depending on the chain/network where the contract gets deployed, it might cost you anything from a few cents to a couple of dollars. The most expensive chain is Ethereum, but at 13 gwei, our ETH demo storage took just about $10 to deploy. Of course, this can vary a lot due to changing gas prices on the Ethereum network. However, if you're not in a rush and can wait a few days, there will always be better times to deploy at lower gas prices, usually on weekends and at night. We've seen ~2 gwei on weekends before, so if you have the patience, you'd pay less than $2 for your storage! On BNB, our demo storage did only cost us $0.15. Compared to a Ledger, that's a lot of saved money already!
The code of these contracts is constant. Other than managed sites like exchanges, no one could ever accidentally introduce any bugs with a new update, which could lead to unexpected losses. A contract will also never be able to freeze your account or funds, like an exchange could.
With a storage contract, you can also minimize the chance of sending your funds to a wrong address. Usually you would type the wallet address of your exchange or hardware wallet, which is still possible with our storage, if preferred. However, with a storage contract, you could also just use the 'deposit' function to deposit your funds, eliminating the chance of any typo in the address completely.
Other than hardware wallets, contracts cannot be broken, cannot be lost, and are available 24/7. You always have access to them when needed, without the need to carry any hardware with you. There is no personal info stored in the contracts either, which could be leaked to any attackers.
Another great advantage is that contracts do not have any seed phrase or private key. Because of that, it's a similar approach to cold wallets, where the private key is also not stored on your computer, so any potential malware on your PC has no access to the private info of any of your wallets.
That said, hardware wallets do have private keys! They are just not stored on your PC. There is still a minimal chance someone could brute-force the private key or seed phrase of your hardware wallet. That's not possible with contracts, simply because a private key does not exist.
You're also not able to connect the contract to any malicious site, accidentally approving your assets or signing any transactions to scammers, resulting in your funds getting drained from your wallets.
The Ultimate Solution?!
No! As always, nothing is perfect.
So what are the disadvantages of storage contracts? One disadvantage might be that contracts are chain-based. Other than wallet addresses, which are usually capable of receiving assets on all chains, contracts are only available on the chains you deploy them on. If you deploy a storage contract on the Ethereum network, you won't be able to send any assets on the BNB Chain to that storage. You would need to deploy a separate storage contract on the BNB Chain as well to be able to store BNB or any other BEP-20 tokens on it.
There is a learning curve to it. If you have never interacted with any contracts on the blockchain before, some steps might be confusing at first or feel unnecessarily complicated. For example, on the blockchain, any amount has to be written with the appropriate decimals. In most cases, tokens usually have 18 decimals, so 1 token has to be written as 1000000000000000000. In some cases, tokens such as USDT might actually only use 6 decimals instead, causing confusion for some people. We included some help functions on the contract to easily display your contract's balance with the correct decimals. Once you get the hang of it, it's just as easy as any of the other available options.
It's not a disadvantage, but we still want to mention the security aspect of storage contracts. The only way you could actually lose your funds is if someone gets access to your owner/deployer wallet, researches your wallet history, spots your storage contract, and withdraws your stored funds. In our opinion, this is very unlikely, but should of course be taken into consideration! Most of the time, hacked wallets still have valuable tokens on them, because most scammers don't actually take a look at the hacked wallets at all. Usually they just withdraw the main currency of the chain, like ETH or BNB, and ignore the rest, maybe with a sweeper bot added to it.
So even if the owner wallet gets hacked, it's unlikely any hacker would look through your transaction history, even more unlikely to spot your deployed contract and read through the actual code. However, it's always recommended to keep the owner wallet of your storage contract as secure as possible. Only use it to interact and withdraw funds from your contract. Don't connect it to any sites, don't use it for any sniper bot or similar. Act like the owner wallet itself holds all the funds!
If you already got a hardware wallet and like using it, you could also use your cold wallet to deploy a storage contract, combining the best of both worlds and increasing the security level to a maximum.
The deployer below will deploy a storage contract for you with just one click. The code is verified and public, so people can interact with it on the blockchain explorer and verify that the code is safe. If you're more experienced and know how to deploy contracts, you could just edit the code to fit your needs and deploy it without verifying. This might save you some gas for omitted functions you don't need, which we included for the ease of use. Not verifying the code will add an extra layer of security because any potential attacker won't be able to simply read the contract's code right away.
Considering all the pros and cons, we still favor the contract solution over any other option. If you came to the same conclusion, feel free to use the guide below to deploy your own storage.
Deployer Contracts
Deploy Storage
Interactive Guide || Text Guide
Manage Storage
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