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CRPT Secure Card

🔍 Last analysed 27th April 2022 . Provided private keys

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Do your own research!

Try out searching for "lost bitcoins", "stole my money" or "scammers" together with the wallet's name, even if you think the wallet is generally trustworthy. For all the bigger wallets you will find accusations. Make sure you understand why they were made and if you are comfortable with the provider's reaction.

If you find something we should include, you can create an issue or edit this analysis yourself and create a merge request for your changes.

What is a bearer token?

Bearer tokens are meant to be passed on from one user to another similar to cash or a banking check. Unlike hardware wallets, this comes with an enormous "supply chain" risk if the token gets handed from user to user anonymously - all bearer past and present have plausible deniability if the funds move. We used to categorize bearer tokens as hardware wallets, but decided that they deserved an altogether different category. Generally, bearer tokens require these attributes:

  • Secure initial setup
  • Tamper evidence
  • Balance check without revealing private keys
  • Small size
  • Low unit price
and either of these applies:
  • Somebody has a backup and needs to be trusted.
  • Nobody has a backup and funds are destroyed if the token is lost or damaged.

The Analysis 

Product/Service Description

Founded by Matthew Wilson, CRPT secure is a service with a “Patent Application Pending No. 2021/06363” that stores seed phrases in a “secure way”. The seed phrases are printed on “quality paper”. The subscription service is divided into tiers. It costs $6 a month.

Personal Touch
Have a member of the CRPTsecure team guide you through every step of securing your seeds with our premium offering.

Physical Offline Storage
Stored physically offline with no online record, providing the safest offline security. It’s not online, absolute peace of mind from hacking attempts.

Pin Tab
Pin-Tab technology to encrypt your seeds, printed on quality paper in stored in quality embossed envelopes.

The Terms and Conditions are generally geared towards the payment details between CRPT Secure SA (Proprietary) Limited and the user.

CRPT Secure has a mobile app available on Android. Subscription to their service is required in order to register.

How it works

  • Purchase an R39pm subscription plan.
  • Enter your seed phrase in the provided field.
  • Submit your seeds for encryption.
  • Export or print the estate information form generated specifically for you.
  • Access to your crypto wallet is secure!

Digital Storage Solution

They also have a digital storage solution which is accessible through the app:

  • The user chooses the number of seeds (12, 18, 24)
  • Name the subscription
  • Input the seed phrases in the app

The price for this service is $2.50 a month

Analysis

There are some elements to the service that we have questions about. We reached out on twitter to the founder and await a response. We have a certain unease about sending seed phrases (of all things!) to another entity even though they may claim it is encrypted. This unease is further aggravated by the feeling of paying them a monthly non-refundable fee with a very long contractual agreement. This is a relatively new service so we’ll await their clarification. Until then we’ll maintain that sending seed phrases to a third party app, even for safe-keeping and retrieval is problematic.

(dg)

Verdict Explained

The device gets delivered with private keys as defined by the provider!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Provided Keys!

Are the keys never shared with the provider?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Provided private keys".

The best hardware wallet cannot guarantee that the provider deleted the keys if the private keys were put onto the device by them in the first place.

There is no way of knowing if the provider took a copy in the process. If they did, all funds controlled by those devices are potentially also under the control of the provider and could be moved out of the client’s control at any time at the provider’s discretion.

The product cannot be independently verified. If the provider puts your funds at risk on purpose or by accident, you will probably not know about the issue before people start losing money. If the provider is more criminally inclined he might have collected all the backups of all the wallets, ready to be emptied at the press of a button. The product might have a formidable track record but out of distress or change in management turns out to be evil from some point on, with nobody outside ever knowing before it is too late.