Wallets vs Vaults — which is better?

What is the difference between a Wallet and a Vault?

What is a crypto wallet? You can set up a crypto wallet to interact with blockchain networks in order to send, receive, buy, and sell cryptocurrency. Your wallet uses a unique, secret private key to digitally sign your transactions on the blockchain, proving that it's really you authorizing transactions. In other words, you use your crypto wallet to perform your crypto transactions on a blockchain network.

A vault, on the other hand, is completely inert. It's completely separate from your blockchain activity. No transactions are going on. It's simply a place to store valuable things like seed phrases, passwords, private keys, and digital art.

So a vault is completely different from a wallet in some major ways:

• Security — A digital vault is significantly more secure. It prioritizes long-term security, and is ideal for digital inheritance.
• Accessibility. Wallets are used for day-to-day crypto transactions. Vaults are more appropriate for preserving your digital assets for inheritance and ensuring that heirs can securely access them when the time comes. Vaults maintain long-term accessibility to your crypto.

What is the Vault12 app?

The Vault12 Guard app is an intelligent digital vault that can back up and support the inheritance of your digital assets like passwords, PINs, seed phrases, private keys, files associated with your NFTs, and digital artwork. It safeguards basically everything that you know and love in the world of crypto.

Why do you need both a wallet and vault?

There are three reasons why you should have both a wallet and a vault for your digital assets.

1. The first reason is backups. It's very important that you've backed up your precious assets, whether they're PINs, passwords, seed phrases, or artwork. Everything should have a backup that is available to you should you need to access it.
2. The second reason is inheritance. It's very easy to lose track of assets that you need to pass on to the next generation. Having a single inventory in one place with all of your digital assets, all of the instructions, PINs, passwords, seed phrases, private keys, and digital artwork that you want to pass on in the case of incapacitation, or when you pass, and having a mechanism to smoothly transfer them is really important. This is not something you can do with a wallet.
3. The third reason is that centralized custodial services are prone to loss. We've seen this time and time again over the last decade. Custodial services are susceptible to fraud and hacking. They're subject to companies going bankrupt and users losing all of their assets. In contrast, the Vault12 app provides a distributed, self-custody backup.