Between you and your crypto portfolio

As writers in this space, our reward comes in cryptocurrency, and many of us have become experts in the handling of cryptocurrency by diving into the crypto-verse and expanding our portfolios. This is a very good thing that has seen several of us breaking the poverty jaw and laying a solid financial foundation for the future. However, there is something that should be a significant concern to all of us and everyone else who holds cryptocurrency.

There is something we should be worried about, something that is even beyond your crypto portfolio. Who is between you and your crypto portfolio?

We are told to keep our crypto wallet keys safe and not to reveal them to anyone to avoid being robbed. And this also means keeping it safe away from relatives and friends, but should anything happens suddenly that might take us to the world beyond unprepared, what will happen to our crypto savings?

This is something that I think every one of us should consider seriously, I am not inferring that someone is going to die suddenly, but several circumstances may take the privilege away from you for being in charge of your crypto wallet and an emergency may arises for someone else to help access your wallet and you are the only one who has access to the wallet. It is a scary thought and we all need to consider it before we go wrong.

We all read the news, maybe even more than a few articles on how some of our favorite celebrities lost their crypto fortunes due to the loss of private keys, and there may be many others who have died with their crypto holdings sitting forever on the blockchain because no one knows their private keys. So much money must have been left behind in an exchange because the owner never told anyone about it and no one knows their password.

This is not just my assumption, a case of this nature happened in my country which was shared by a friend of the person who died suddenly of a brief illness. Only the friend knows about the deceased crypto portfolio because they both were trading on the Binance platform and knows the value of each other portfolios. This person died leaving over $3,000 worth of cryptocurrency on Binance. He has a wife and kids left behind but no one knows his password, and the worst was that he never saved it on his mobile phone.

Sad that may be, there must be several unreported circumstances like that happening in this crypto space. I am not even talking about a major loss of thousands of dollars. But if the loss was only small, the impact on his family would have been substantial. We need to pay attention to this issue and be prepared for it before it happens.

As much as we love crypto and think it will only benefit us, it can harm us too. So we need to learn how to protect our coins from loss and for what purpose do we need to keep our coins? Are we going to use it someday? Or to sell it later? How are we going to pass it along to our family members? What measures should we take now to carry our family members along with our cryptocurrency journey and at the same time have maximum security in our portfolios? These are the questions I think we should be asking ourselves right now.

I believe for most of us the future is what we are looking forward to with our cryptocurrency, and that future is still in the distance. Therefore, I think there is a need to have a trusted person who knows about our cryptocurrency details, on the event that anything suddenly beyond our control happens this person can safely manage our entire crypto portfolios for us. And our loved ones will still have access to our crypto when they need it. This is not to take away the responsibilities we will have to take for our crypto, but just to make sure we keep ourselves in control of it.

I think it will be a good investment to allocate some money to the protection of our loved ones as a testbed, and I think we need to put in place a monitoring system to make sure this system can be built. We all need to keep in mind that in the not-so-far future, most of us who are single today in the crypto space is going to have a family of our own.

Now that I think about it, I have been thinking of how to do the needful in this regard. I have been going over all the tips I have seen and I have gathered the following points which have come to my mind as I write this. I am sure you have done some of these but let me share some of my thoughts too:

Set up an emergency wallet in the custody of a loved one and send some of your cryptocurrency into the wallet for safekeeping. I would think it is still a relatively safe and secure place to keep your cryptocurrencies, so it is worth trying to guard them here. The person should not be involved in any trading in or out of your crypto unless you give them access to do so. Even then you have to make sure the password and seed phrases to the wallet are recorded in a secure place. The person also should know about that. In this case, you now have a human backup for your wallet.

Another way is to carry your family members along in your cryptocurrency dealings. Preferably, your wife should know most of your details, especially your password, so you are in sync with each other. This way if anything happens to you she can access your crypto. It is only logical that you want to keep her in your loop, so that in the unfortunate event that something happens to you and you are not able to access your crypto, she will be able to do it for you.

If you are not married, have a relative you can trust to be your partner in this initiative, so that both you and he have this security in place. That is where your family members should play a crucial role in your crypto journey.

This might be a bit emotional, but my concern is not about me. My concern is for my loved ones in the event of a crisis, if I am not there to protect them.

Again I would like to stress that we need to be conscious of who we hand over our passwords to because if we leave our loved ones on their own, this could result in a disaster. There have been lots of stories of people who have lost all their crypto due to the negligence of their loved ones, and in one of the most painful incidents, they even lost their life.

I am not saying that your loved ones should know everything about your cryptocurrency, but ideally this should be the case. In most cases, however, you will have to decide on a safety protocol, so that your crypto remains in their custody as a backup. So you must be clear with your loved ones on what level of access you will give them.

I know I am beginning to sound like a mediator between you and your loved ones, but I believe it is important that we create a safety net for our loved ones as well, because at the end of the day it is them we depend upon in this world.

So the bottom line is to take care of your family and make sure they are not caught off guard, should anything untoward happen.

Good luck in your cryptocurrency journey.

Lead image by [storyset on freepik](https://Image by storyset on Freepik)