We’ve reviewed a tonne of different crypto wallets to help you choose the best for your business.
A crypto wallet is a software app that stores your private keys. Private keys are the lifeblood of crypto. Because ownership of your private keys is what gives you control over your crypto assets. So it’s vital that the wallet you choose for your business is secure.
When you think of a wallet, you might think of the physical wallet you use to hold your cash and debit or credit cards.
But when it comes to crypto wallets, they don’t actually hold any of your digital assets.
No. Your crypto assets are stored on the blockchain…
Blockchains are one big giant public ledger - they are a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of decentralised computer systems on the blockchain.
Think of it like a verifiable record book for all transactions that occur on a given network.
So what’s in your wallet?
What your wallet does hold is your private keys which give you access and control over these assets.
So when you create a wallet, what you’re actually doing is creating a public/private key pair which gives you control over your crypto.
Choosing the right crypto wallet for your business is going to depend on what you plan to use it for. In fact, most businesses have multiple wallets for different purposes.
Here are few things to think about:
We can generally bunch up crypto wallets into three distinct categories. These are:
A hot wallet is a crypto wallet that is always connected to the internet and cryptocurrency networks.
Browser-based wallets, mobile wallets and desktop wallets are typically hot wallets.
And they tend to be most popular amongst casual crypto investors - think MetaMask and Trustwallet.
The primary benefit of a hot wallet is ease of use. Because they’re always online, they’re convenient for handling your crypto.
The biggest problem with hot wallets is that they store your private keys on your physical device. So anyone with access to your device could potentially steal your crypto. Now, don’t forget they don’t need physical access to your device either. If a hacker manages to put malware onto your machine, they could gain control of your wallet. Which is why people with large amounts of crypto don’t tend to store them in hot wallets.
Web wallets are the least secure, though all crypto hot wallets are vulnerable to online attacks.
Warm wallets combine the transaction speed of hot wallets with an additional level of security. With a warm wallet your private keys are held online and transactions can be created automatically, but human involvement is needed to sign the transaction before it can be sent to the blockchain.
Most people are familiar with multisignature wallets - these require two or more parties to sign a transaction before it can be executed.
But by far the best warm wallets are MPC-based.
MPC wallets are more advanced than multisig wallets. They also require a quorum of two or more parties to approve transactions before they can be sent to the blockchain. However, they have more advanced security features and great operational flexibility.
Hardware wallets or hardware security modules (HSMs) are cold wallets.
Cold wallets store your private keys offline.
You may have heard of people referring to this as air gapping or on an air gapped device. What it means is that your private keys are stored on a device which isn’t connected to the internet. The advantage to this is that if your private keys aren’t online, they’re impossible for a hacker to steal without access to the physical device. And even with access to the device, you’d still need the pin/password to open it.
The downside to cold wallets is that they’re cumbersome, because you need the device with you in order to be able to sign transactions. So you’re sacrificing convenience for the sake of security.
Ordinarily, if you were managing large sums of cryptocurrencies, I’d argue that it’s absolutely worth using cold storage. However, if you’re using an MPC-based wallet you’re not gaining much in terms of additional security with a cold wallet. But you are sacrificing convenience.
Ok, let’s get into the list. Here it is!
Gnosis Safe is a multisig (or multisignature) wallet that requires multiple parties to sign transactions before they can be approved. The wallet itself has been around since 2019 and processed billions of dollars in transactions. So in that respect it’s battle tested and proven to be reliable.
Until recently, it’s been the preferred choice for teams and businesses because they didn’t want to rely on hot wallets that could be compromised by a single point of failure. And most business wallet solutions were incredibly expensive. Fortunately, there are now a number of alternatives to Gnosis that are better for businesses. But as far as non-custodial wallets go, it’s still the best.
The main advantage of Gnosis is that it eliminates the single point of failure by requiring multiple trusted parties to approve transactions. When you set up a Gnosis Safe you’ll need to decide the threshold for transactions. The threshold or quorum can be established as either ‘n of n’ or ‘m of n’:
‘n of n’ - all trusted parties are required to approve a transaction. For example: 5 of 5, or 3 of 3.
‘m of n’ - a threshold of parties is required to approve transactions. For example: 3 of 5, or 2 of 3.
However, there are some disadvantages to Gnosis. Personally, my biggest gripe with it is that when setting up you have to link your existing wallets. This means that when you add what Gnosis calls “owners” to a Safe you need to input each of their individual wallet addresses. And this can’t be undone in future. So your multisig wallet is forever linked to these addresses.
This strikes me as something incredibly inconvenient for a business.
What if you want to change the owners? Add or remove a party to the multisig? Well, in these cases you have to set up a new multsig wallet and transfer the assets over to it.
Another disadvantage is the lack of privacy. Because each owner must sign transactions separately, it’s possible to see which wallets are involved in a multisig by looking onchain. And so, it’s possible for malicious third parties to track and trace members of a multisig.
That said, you may want complete transparency over your transactions. As is the case for many DAOs.
Ok, so obviously it’s incredibly biased of me to pick my own wallet for this category.
But
I can, because:
I wholeheartedly believe that we’re building the best crypto business wallet for small and medium companies.
Here’s why:
When we started building Krayon, we looked at every wallet and custody provider we could find on the internet. And we realised that the mid-market (small and medium businesses) is massively underserved.
Most wallet companies are either building for retail or major institutions. And this leaves you trying to crowbar a wallet into your business that just isn’t fit for purpose. Which is why we’re building what we believe is the first and only wallet built specifically for mid-market firms. Here’s what makes it best for you:
Our business wallet uses MPC (multi-party computation) - a state of the art custody solution typically used by major institutions. MPC gives you a greater degree of security than a typical hot wallet/hardware wallet combination. And it offers you superior flexibility when compared to a multisig wallet.
Similar to a multi-sig, you can set up the approval threshold to determine how many people are required to approve transactions. This reduces the risk of your wallet being hacked.
This wallet was built for businesses, so of course you can add your staff/employees as users. And manage their permissions at both the organisation and wallet level. This includes choosing which wallets they have access to, which contracts you want to whitelist, and whether they can or cannot initiate and/or sign transactions.
Want to set up a spending limit for your marketing team? With our wallet you can. It’s trivial to set the amount and frequency for teams or individuals so you don’t have to approve every single transaction.
We’ve made it easy to make bulk payments in just a few clicks. No more manually approving hundreds of transactions in MetaMask!
We know that setting up a business account with exchanges or a crypto bank account can be a real pain. Which is why we offer a reliable fiat on/off-ramp service directly from your wallet.
When it comes to year and end and you need to report your transactions for tax purposes, it’s easy to forget what some transactions were for. We let you tag transactions and add references to make it easier for you when it comes to tax reporting.
We’re making it easier for you to invoice and receive payments in crypto.
I see this get taken for granted a lot. But when it comes to your company's financial operations, privacy is incredibly important. And it's often the least cited advantage of MPC.
Unlike a multisig wallet, our MPC wallet creates your signature off chain. So it’s impossible for hackers to track and trace your trusted third parties, or to identify how many users are required to approve a transaction.
Let us know!
If you have an idea for a feature, then come tell us about it. We’d love to hear from you. After all, our goal is to build the best business wallet for you. And we can’t do that without talking directly with our customers. So, if we don’t already have it as a feature, talk to us and we’ll see how fast we can build it for you.
Hardware wallets store your private keys on a physical device - they look a lot like USB sticks with small LED screens.
When you want to sign a transaction with a hardware wallet, you need to connect the device to your computer and manually approve the transaction from the device. This prevents someone with access to your laptop or desktop from one day transferring your assets out of your hot wallet. In fact, you can integrate your hardware wallet with your hot wallet for added security, but some of them do have their own wallet apps as well.
The best known hardware wallets are Trezor and Ledger. Both are pretty similar in terms of features and compatibility. So I wouldn’t worry too much about which one to choose if you’re debating between these two. However, there is another hardware wallet I’d like to suggest.
Grid Plus is one hardware wallet you probably haven’t heard of. So let me explain what makes it the best hardware wallet on the market right now.
Firstly, as far as usability is concerned, it’s a programmable hardware wallet that integrates with MetaMask. But what makes it special is that it comes with a five-inch touchscreen display, so that you can read exactly what you're signing.
That may sound like it’s just a nice to have, but here’s why it matters:
One of the most common crypto hacks is phishing scams - this is where you click a link in an email or on a website and it convinces you to “connect your wallet”… It could even be that you’re connecting to a new DeFi protocol you want to try out. For whatever reason, it’s always advisable to read the transaction message in your wallet so that you know exactly what you’re signing. However, transaction messages are typically pretty long. And they’re virtually impossible to read on the tiny LED screens you get with a Ledger or Trezor wallet. This one feature makes for a world of difference when it comes to security. And that’s the first reason I’ve picked it as my favourite hardware wallet.
But it gets better:
Most hardware wallets use seed phrases for backup and disaster recovery. And if you’ve ever dealt with a seed phrase, you know they’re a pain.
In contrast, Grid Plus uses what it calls “SafeCards” - The SafeCard is meant to be a PIN protected, unpowered physical key store. This allows storage of digital secrets offline, but also gives a familiar experience of spending money with a chip card.
Now, the trade off here is that at $397 - Grid Plus is much more expensive than its competitors. But there are two caveats to this:
The latter means that Grid Plus could work out cheaper if you’re planning to buy a number of hardware wallets.
Other things you might want to know about this wallet:
Grid Plus is relative new to hardware wallets. The engineering team is based out of Austin, Texas. Their flagship hardware wallet is called the Lattice1. And according to their website:
The Lattice 1 enables management of crypto assets with a simple secure interface. With a dedicated secure enclave, anti-tamper features, secure screen, and human readable smart contract markup you are always in control of your keys. Pair your Lattice1 with any supported software wallet to access your crypto from anywhere. Look up balances, send transactions, and easily switch between your Lattice1 and SafeCard wallets.
Anchorage is actually much more than a wallet - it's a US chartered national trust bank. Now, this may sound super appealing to you, especially if you’re based in the US. As of course, it comes with all the insurances and compliance requirements of being a bank. However, it really is only available to mega institutions.
Their target customer base is governments and central banks, or bulge-bracket firms. So for most businesses, they’re not relevant, because they won’t take you on as a client.
But, for the sake of completeness, I did want to cover them.
As far as their product is concerned, it’s one of the best I’ve seen. And you can understand why governments would want to use it to secure their digital assets.
Anchorage’s wallet uses a cold storage solution involving HSMs (Hardware Security Modules). This means that your private keys are air gapped (kept offline) at all times. Making it virtually impossible to exploit, unless you could get access to their physical storage site.
Of course, no solution is perfect (except us maybe!). So there are some downsides to this type of solution. The main problems being scalability and availability:
Having said all of that, you can see why bulge bracket institutions would want to incorporate Anchorage as part of a comprehensive custody solution. And some are known to pair HSM solutions with MPC wallets.
A lot of people don’t tend to think about this part until it gets closer to the tax year end. But it’s way better to think it over now, so that you’re not scrambling to pull together all of your transactions at the last minute.
If you are or have been using multiple wallets then I wish you the best of luck and salute you… Just kidding. You’ve got this!
With multiple different wallets you’ll want to use an aggregator that will let you connect your wallets as well as any centralised crypto exchange business accounts you might have. Cointracker seems to be the most popular, but there are plenty of others if that doesn’t work for you.
The main problem you’re going to have with any of these solutions is that your transactions won’t have any metadata like transaction references or types.
If you’re just looking to report your PnL then this should be sufficient. But if you have business expenses or you’re running crypto payroll, then you’ll need to itemise the transactions.
Fortunately, if you haven’t already set up a bunch of wallets, then there is a better way:
You could use Krayon :)
Our business crypto wallet lets you add references and tag transactions for all of your wallets. This way you don’t have to worry about remembering why the hell you sent $50 worth of ETH to Craig from the ops team twelve months ago.
You might hate me for saying this, but regardless of which tools you use to streamline your tax reporting - it’s probably best you hire a CPA or local accountant familiar with crypto taxes in your region.
Now that I’ve got that warning out the way, let’s continue:
If you’re using multiple wallets and exchanges to buy and sell crypto then your best option is Cointracker. It’ll let you aggregate your wallets and review all transactions - from which you can compile your tax reports. And it integrates with software like TurboTax.
If you’re using Krayon’s MPC solution for all of your wallets, then you’ll be able to download all transactions from our platform. We don’t currently integrate with any third party tax software. But it is on our agenda. So if you have a preferred provider that you’d like us to integrate with, please let us know and I’ll make that a priority for the dev team!
