Business,Operations,Guide,Module 2.5
Module 2.6
Best Practices & Analogies
To reinforce, here are some bullet-point best practices for managing your crypto wallet, with comparisons to familiar concepts:
Keep Your Keys Safe: Your seed phrase is like the master key to your digital vault. Never share it and store it securely offline. If this were a traditional office, it’s akin to locking important documents in a safe and not giving the key to anyone else. In the digital realm, you are the custodian of your funds – there is no helpdesk that can recover a lost key.
Use Hardware Wallets for Large Funds: For significant amounts or long-term storage, use a cold (hardware) wallet. This is similar to using a bank’s vault for valuables instead of carrying them in your pocket.
Double-Check Everything: When sending funds, double-check the recipient address (just as you would double-check a wire transfer’s account number). There’s no bank teller to catch a typo – if you send crypto to 0xABC…123 and it was supposed to be 0xABC…124, the money is gone to the wrong address. Many wallets show the first and last few characters of addresses as a checksum; always verify those match the intended destination.
Be Cautious of Phishing: Common attacks include fake websites or messages tricking you into entering your seed phrase or private key. Treat your seed like you would your debit card PIN – you’d be suspicious if a random email asked for your PIN, and likewise, never enter your seed phrase except in your wallet app when you intend to do a recovery. Bittrees team will never ask you for your private keys. If you need technical help, we might guide you, but never to reveal your secret phrase.
Multiple Wallets for Multiple Purposes: Just as you might have separate personal and business bank accounts, you can maintain separate crypto wallets. For instance, you might have one wallet specifically for Bittrees-related activities (maybe even identified by an ENS name or subdomain, see
Module 4.4, and another for personal crypto holdings. This separation can help manage accounting and security (if one wallet is compromised, the other is unaffected).Understanding Custody for Compliance: In an Human Resources or Operations context, realize that holding crypto is holding a bearer asset. Whomever has the keys has the asset. For employee reimbursements or payments in crypto, ensure that employees provide the correct addresses and understand how to use their wallets – part of operations training may involve educating staff on self-custody to avoid mishaps (this guide can serve as a reference for them too). It’s analogous to handling cash: you wouldn’t hand cash to someone who doesn’t have a wallet or safe place to put it.
By mastering wallets and self-custody, you lay the groundwork for everything else in the DAO world. Next, we will explore multi-signature wallets (shared control of funds) which is an essential security practice for organizations like Bittrees, and then proceed to other decentralized applications and tools.