July 18, 2020

Samsung Galaxy phones can now store your Stellar key: should you use this feature?

The biggest Stellar-related news of the week is that Samsung Blockchain Keystore now supports Stellar. Is it a good idea to store your wallet key on the phone?

You’re probably familiar with password managers like Apple Keychain, Windows Credential Manager or Google Password Manager. They are good enough for things like email and your Facebook account, but they are obviously not secure enough for crypto wallet keys.

New iPhones also have a chip called Secret Enclave, and that would be fine for wallet keys, but you can’t import a mnemonic phrase into it, at least now yet. There’s also a framework known as Apple CryptoKit, but it’s aimed at developers. Finally, Samsung created Blockchain Keystore — a way to store private keys in a safe area on the phone that is not connected to the internet, like a hardwallet. The Keystore can also sign transactions safely. At first, it supported only ETH and BTC, but later 30+ more coins were added.

Now Samsung Blockchain Keystore has finally integrated Stellar.Thus, XLM users finally have a way to save their private key on the phone. For now, the Keystore is available only on the more expensive Galaxy models: S20, Note 10, Fold, Z Flip, and S 10.

If you have one of these Samsung phones, you can store your XLMwallet key in the Keystore. The system is indeed quite safe — and definitely much safer than keeping it somewhere on your laptop or, even worse, in your email.

However, if you don’t have one of the latest Galaxy phones, we don’t think it’s worth buying one just in order to have this feature. You can still lose the phone, after all. If the Keystore is the only place where you’ve saved the key/seed phrase, it will be gone forever with the phone. So, you’ll need backup copies anyway.

In our experience, the best way to store a wallet key or seed safely is to print it out in several copies on a sheet of paper and hide those pieces of paper in places where you’ll be able to find them. For example, in a book that holds special meaning to you, or in an album of your childhood photos. You might even make a note on your computer with hints to the locations — say, if you write ‘Winnie the Pooh’, it will help you remember to look in the book about Winnie the Pooh. The important thing is that you don’t save the actual key or seed phrase in a location that can be accessed through the internet.

As for the price of XLM, it has reacted positively to the news of the partnership with Samsung, growing from $0.0942 to $0.1055, or by 12% in just one day. Overall, Stellar’s performance in July has been, well, stellar: our favorite coin added 57%! Do you remember how we kept telling you to HODL? You can see now that we’ve been right, and we remain bullish on XLM. We are convinced that lumens can go beyond $0.15 in the next 3 months.

Do you agree with our forecast? And would you store your private key in the Samsung Keystore? Share in the comments!

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