A bank can freeze your account. It can close it with a letter that explains nothing. It can be hacked, go under, or decide you are the wrong sort of customer. In exchange, if you forget your password, someone answers the phone.
Holding your own money reverses both halves of that deal. Nobody can freeze it, nobody can close it, and nobody can lose it on your behalf. And if you lose your way in, nobody answers the phone. Not us, not anyone.
Most explanations of this either skip the second half or make it sound terrifying. It is neither. It is a design decision with a straightforward response, which is to set up more than one way back in before you have anything worth getting back to.
What you are actually protecting
Not a password. A key.
A password is checked by a company that could reset it. A key is the thing itself — the only proof that money is yours. It lives on your device, encrypted, and it never goes anywhere near us, which is precisely why nobody at our end can move your money, hand it to anyone, or be compelled to.
There is no support route that ends in your funds coming back. That is the trade for there being no route that ends in somebody taking them.
Four ways in, and you want at least two
Losing everything requires losing all of your routes at once. Having one is how people come unstuck; having two makes it very unlikely; having three makes it a story you tell rather than a disaster.
- A passkey on your phoneYour face or your fingerprint. This is the one you will use daily. Passkeys sync through your Apple or Google account, so a broken phone is genuinely just a broken phone.
- A second passkey somewhere elseA laptop, a tablet, or a small security key on your keyring. This is the one that covers you when the first is gone. Set it up on day one; nobody ever sets it up on the day they need it.
- An encrypted backup fileA file you keep wherever suits you — your own cloud storage, a USB stick in a drawer. Useless to anyone who finds it without your passkey or passphrase, which means you can keep it in ordinary places rather than treating it like plutonium.
- People you nominateSplit your recovery across a few people you trust: a partner, a sibling, an accountant. No one of them can do anything alone. Any three of five can put it back together between them. It is the only arrangement here that survives you losing everything you own in a fire.
And beneath all of them, the recovery phrase you were shown once at the start. Write it down, keep it somewhere sensible, and never type it into anything that asks for it.
Two rules that prevent almost everything
Nobody legitimate will ever ask for your recovery phrase. Not support, not us, not an official-looking email, not a helpful person in a chat group. There is no situation in which the correct answer to that request is to provide it. It is the single question that separates a scam from a real conversation.
Check the amount before you approve. A payment cannot be reversed. That is what protects the shop from chargebacks, and it means a mistyped figure is simply gone.
A sensible amount of caution
You do not need a safe or a fireproof box. Think of it like the cash in your wallet rather than your life savings: keep what you spend where it is convenient, keep anything substantial somewhere with more locks on it.
If you are only ever paying for coffee and haircuts, the balance is small and the stakes are small. That is most people, and the four routes above are comfortably more than enough.
Ceodore asks you to set up two ways back in before you can receive anything, because one way in is how people lose everything.