Wallets vs Vaults - which are better?

What is the Vault12 app?

The Vault12 app is an intelligent digital vault that knows how to back up and support 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 Web3.

What is the difference between a Wallet and a Vault?

One of the questions that we hear a lot is "What's the difference between a wallet and a vault?"

Basically, a wallet is initialized using a seed phrase or a private key, interacts with a blockchain, and allows you to send and receive, buy and sell cryptocurrency. It enables you to sign transactions on the blockchain, authorizing their execution.

So a wallet is used to perform a lot of transactions and interactions with the blockchain.

A Vault, on the other hand, is completely inert. It's completely separate from your blockchain activity. There are no transactions 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.

Why do you need both a wallet and Vault?

There are three reasons that 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. So 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, really important.
   It's not something you're going to be able to 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 every year for the last decade. They're subject to fraud. They're subject to hacking. They're subject to companies going bankrupt and people losing all of their assets. In contrast, the Vault12 app provides a distributed self-custody backup.