A0 ~ A9 The mnemonic storage plan for the road to godhood, what level are you at?

What? Your knowledge of mnemonic storage is still limited to a piece of paper?

How much money you have will largely affect how you protect your mnemonics. If you don't have the necessary life-saving equipment to upgrade and fight monsters, you will be beaten back to the novice village.

OneKey roughly summarizes the four levels of mnemonic security. What level have you reached?

🦐 Common people: below A5 level

If you have thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in your hands, you are probably in the novice village of Crypto. Or, you are a victim who fell from A6, A7 or even A8.

For the former, you may have just created a few wallets using Little Fox or Dog Bot, and are excitedly exploring this Crypto continent full of "legends of getting rich quickly."

After you make some money, you will basically withdraw it in fiat currency or temporarily keep it in an exchange.

You may not have a lot of ideas about mnemonics and self-custody of crypto assets. You just took a screenshot or copied the 12 words generated by the wallet to a txt file and stored it on your phone or computer.

At this moment, you may be immersed in the excitement of trading, not realizing that many hackers are quietly watching you, hoping that this newbie will take the bait...

You really need to learn basic encryption security knowledge now - otherwise, a phishing private message on Twitter may send you back to the electronics factory, where you could be caught by OnTime in minutes.

The latter who fell from A6, A7 or even A8 are very unfortunate, and all this could have been avoided. It has to be admitted that this is the most common class decline channel in the cryptocurrency circle.

You may have paid a heavy price for not paying attention to encryption security - the leakage of mnemonics often means that everything is back to zero.

Moreover, hackers are now industrialized, phishing, stealing money, and laundering money in one go, so the hope of recovering the stolen money is slim. From now on, you need to pay great attention to security and then make a comeback.

🐬 Beginners: A6 ~ A7 level

Congratulations on leaving the Novice Village. At this point, you should have completed the Novice Tutorial.

Maybe the KOLs of “A8 per capita” will not admit it, but in fact, they store tens of millions of crypto assets, which is more than 80% of the users in the cryptocurrency circle. This money is even the disposable income of most ordinary Chinese people for ten years or even a lifetime.

At this time, as you become more involved in Crypto, you or your friends may have experienced various phishing and hacking incidents. You start reading the Blockchain Dark Forest Self-help Manual and begin to understand well-known hardware wallets such as OneKey, Ledger and Keystone.

You understand what a cold wallet is and what a hot wallet is, and you have figured out some basic network security knowledge and Crypto anti-phishing common sense.

At this point, some ordinary phishing scams will no longer catch you, and you will never ignore the risks and install strange software or interact with strange websites again.

You see, there is no impenetrable wall. We can never predict which software we downloaded suddenly has a vulnerability, or accidentally clicked a virus, causing your computer to be controlled or your private key to be uploaded. Therefore, the mnemonic must be generated and stored offline, and cannot be placed on an Internet-connected device to prevent hacker virus intrusion.

Finally, you should honestly write down the mnemonic phrase on a piece of paper and put it in a safe together with your property certificate and valuable gold jewelry, and consider using a hardware cold wallet to store and interact with coins.

🐳 The A8 level

You're killing madly.

If your liquid crypto assets can survive both bull and bear markets, and can remain above 10 million even in the worst case scenario - then you have surpassed 99% of people in the cryptocurrency world and are standing at the top of the pyramid.

Even in other industries, being able to easily take out more than A8 in liquidity is very impressive. Those who are willing to put such a large amount of funds in the highly volatile Crypto are most likely Solitaire believers and big players who have experienced at least two cycles, or wealthy people with a large total asset who are considering diversifying some of it into Crypto.

At this point, your cognition and vision have reached a certain level. The experience of fighting and upgrading in the cryptocurrency circle or other industries has given you insight into the laws of social operation and the darkness of human nature. You understand that the centralized world is full of makeshift teams, and you hate the backdoors left by the project owners, the collapse of banks and cryptocurrency exchanges, and the profit-seeking law enforcement of various governments.

At this point, you have deeply understood the spiritual core of Crypto and the importance of self-custody.

You absolutely cannot tolerate the theft of your mnemonic phrase.

You have to know that this level of asset loss is no joke. If you want to be your own bank, you need to be more stringent about your security level and be more careful about risk calculations - even if this may sacrifice some financial flexibility.

As a veteran on the chain, you are familiar with hackers' phishing techniques, from permit signatures to Twitter permission authorization phishing, you know them all.

You fully understand what risk exposure is. You start using a separate Macbook for trading (even if you play with local dogs, you have a dedicated device), and strictly distinguish between cold wallets and hot wallets. You are very clear about the purpose and security of each address, even to the point of being precise about what authorizations each address has and what websites it interacts with. You have a good habit of regularly clearing authorizations or changing wallet addresses when gas is low.

You understand the risk of single point failure and start purchasing multiple hardware wallets. For long-term large amounts of coins, use more than 3/5 multi-signatures and entrust part of the keys to your family or trusted people.

You start thinking about encrypting the private key multiple times, sharding it using Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme or some other similar partitioning algorithm, and using a better fireproof and waterproof inert metal medium for recording (such as OneKey's Titanium KeyTag).

You have forever discarded the little piece of paper with written records that has been with you for many years. It has turned yellow.

You have strict requirements for the storage environment of your mnemonics. You start to consider using a national standard C-level anti-theft safe, and start to deploy a comprehensive intelligent security system for the real estate under your name involving mnemonics, including video surveillance, window and door intrusion monitoring, automatic alarm and other systems. You should be able to know the physical status of your mnemonics at any time on your mobile phone.

You start to pay attention to your personal security, and even consider hiring a bodyguard when you travel to a country with a high crime rate. If you are extremely risk-averse, you may even start to think of ways to hide the size of your assets - rather than showing off and testing the bottom line of human nature.

If your friends who used to play with you suddenly ask you to go to Myanmar or Thailand for a party, you would be afraid of being set up - because you have read the article "He used a $4 knife to rob me of 4 million U" by OneKey (web link).

✝️ Unprecedented: A9 and above

You become a legend.

Standing at the top of the pyramid, you are likely to be a well-known person in the industry, and your stories will even be circulated in and outside the cryptocurrency circle. If your crypto assets move a little bit, you will be on the media's "Whale Alert".

You calculated your total assets and found that you can already beat some listed companies and even some small American banks. At this point, your wealth and situation are too heavy for an ordinary human body to bear.

Unless you follow Vitalik’s geeky digital nomad route, you must diversify your risks—you must believe in probability quantification, human nature game, and scientific management rather than character. You can’t let a simple “mnemonic” or even “yourself” become a single point of failure risk.

For your bulk assets, you need to consider adopting a combination of enterprise-level crypto asset MPC self-custody solutions and compliant trusts, and adopt bank-level management processes and multi-layer security measures. Many of these service providers will also provide you with some insurance to hedge against force majeure risks.

You start thinking seriously about all the black swans that might come up, regulations, politics, war, etc. You start planning your citizenship and tax residency, researching crypto- and tax-friendly countries. Make sure you don’t become a target of a certain government.

It is also an ideal choice to consider setting up a family office to assist in management. Let the family office help manage and protect crypto wealth, isolate corporate crypto assets and personal assets from the risk of execution or bankruptcy claims, and conduct global tax planning and orderly inheritance planning.

You will also enter the next level of personal security considerations. You will have to face the "evil maid attack (web link)" and have to consider the precautions of the people around you and even the person next to you.

For public trips, it is very likely that you have been targeted by relevant criminal gangs. Therefore, before planning any public travel or activities (especially in countries with high crime rates), you need to work with security companies to conduct security assessments and risk planning to avoid unnecessary attention and potential threats. You will most likely need to use VVIP special VIP security channels at airports, hotels, and events, and give priority to accommodation with advanced security measures, and even need a temporary private security team to ensure that the possibility of extortion of asset rights is zero.

Perhaps you are beginning to miss the days when you could manage your assets with a piece of paper. Even if you call yourself a leek on Twitter, you have to add a "big number" in front of it.

The boat has passed through thousands of mountains.

✨ Last

Therefore, whether you are just trying your hand at A5 in the novice village or are already at the top of the pyramid above A9, remember one thing: in this era of digital wealth, learning and practicing advanced security measures is a compulsory course for everyone.

Only in this way can you ensure that you can truly protect your wealth and security in this world full of challenges and opportunities.