Vitalik Buterin Reveals His Go-To Strategy for Keeping Crypto Safe
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum (ETH) and a billionaire, recently shared his preferred method for users to self-custody their cryptocurrency.
Buterin suggests using multisig wallets and trusted individuals or devices called “guardians” to ensure secure storage.
A multisig wallet necessitates multiple signatures to verify and execute transactions. Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation store the majority of their cryptocurrency in a multisig wallet.
Buterin also mentions “social recovery wallets,” which he discussed in more detail in a January 2021 blog post.
“Multisig wallets (eg. Gnosis Safe) are an easy and safe way to store funds, and can give you most of the key benefits of self-custody – namely, your funds not being subject to disappearing because a centralized entity that seemed trustworthy turns out not to be at all – without the risks of having to be personally responsible for your entire security setup. I use a multisig wallet personally to store the bulk of my funds, as does the Ethereum Foundation.”
According to Buterin, trusting other people with securing one’s coins entails a certain level of trust, but it also makes it easier to recover one’s cryptocurrency if one becomes compromised.
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Buterin recommends that at least one guardian should be a wallet on the user’s own device, and others should control enough guardians to recover one’s funds if the user disappears.
Each guardian should be on a separate device, according to Buterin.
“My rule of thumb is that enough guardians should be controlled by other people that if you disappear, there are enough other guardians left to recover your funds. That is, you should control at least one guardian, and at most N(set of addresses) -M (trusted people) guardians. Also, each guardian should be on a separate device (laptop, phone, old phone, etc).”
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
