Investing in cryptocurrency is gaining ground since the whopping increase in the value of Bitcoin, and there are investors who are risking and bringing in significant amounts in the crypto game. Many are past the phase of just trying cryptocurrency investments out with loose change. However, despite the impressive gains that cryptocurrency has shown, it remains to be a volatile market. Without any regulation from governments or central banks, there is no assurance of client protection from hacks and fraudulent online attacks.
Thus, it is essential for crypto investors to choose a secure wallet and to diversify their digital assets. For example, it would be ideal for maintaining a hot wallet online like Coinbase while safekeeping the remaining long-term digital assets in a cold hardware wallet like Trezor. This article will explain how to transfer from Coinbase to Trezor.
Understanding Trezor
Coinbase is digital crypto storage or a hot wallet through which you can access your crypto coins. As a hot wallet, your cryptocurrency transactions are made online. Since transactions like accessing, sending, receiving, and transferring cryptocurrency are made online, it may not be free from online theft and similar malicious activities. What’s good with Coinbase, though, is that it automatically offers you 100% insurance.
But if you are holding large amounts of cryptocurrency, it may be best not to dump all on an online platform like Coinbase, despite the assurance of being totally insured. The wisest move is still very much like the classic advice – diversify, and don’t keep your eggs in one basket. The other secure basket, for that matter, is a Trezor device.
A Trezor device is a hardware wallet, or cold storage, which looks like a USB. This small, compact storage keeps the private and public keys that give you access to your cryptocurrency. This was released in 2013 as the first cryptocurrency cold wallet in the market.
The utmost safety feature of a Trezor is that as a cold wallet, the software is offline, and the keys are difficult to duplicate because they are locked in that small device that you can carry with you or keep in a secure corner of your home or office. Imagine it this way: sending or accessing your crypto coins via Trezor is like opening a delicate package in a private room away from the prying eyes of the malicious, whereas cryptocurrency transactions online are akin to opening that delicate package in a public place for all to see. Additionally, the company that offers Trezor regularly updates the hardware to ensure utmost security.
Coinbase to Trezor
Having discussed the nature of Coinbase and Trezor, here are a few instructions on how to transfer from Coinbase to Trezor:
- Set up your Trezor device following the instructions it comes with and create an account on wallet.trezor.io.
- Connect your Trezor device to your PC or laptop, and go to wallet.trezor.io. A precaution: be sure that the site you are visiting is the correct site, with the accurate URL, and not some phishing sites that mimic or read like the correct Trezor website, with very subtle variations.
- Encode your pin.
- Select Trezor Account where you will transfer your coins to.
- Click on ‘Receive’ shown on the top menu.
- Choose ‘Show full address.’ Be sure not to send or receive transactions from cryptocurrency addresses different from yours. Always check the coin drop down to ensure you are sending or receiving the right coins considering the generated address.
- Verify the address. See that the address shown on your computer screen is the same as that on your Trezor device. An important note on verifying the address: read every character and see that they match. You can’t afford to just be checking the first and the last characters, trusting that everything in the middle is uncompromised.
- After verifying a couple of times, click ‘Continue’ on your Trezor device.
- Copy the address as shown on wallet.trezor.io on your computer screen for pasting later in the succeeding steps.
- Now, log in to your Coinbase account.
- Once logged in, click ‘accounts’ on the upper part of the dashboard.
- Next, under accounts, choose the account you wish to retrieve coins from, then press ‘Send’.
- This time, enter the Trezor address that you copied earlier in Step 9 onto the ‘Recipient’ field.
- Key in the number of coins that you want to send to Trezor, with an accompanying note for easy reference. Click ‘continue.’
- Click ‘View Details’ to confirm the status of your transaction, as well as to track its progress.
Another option for tracking the progress of your transfer from Coinbase to Trezor is through the Blockstream block explorer. Aside from showing you your transaction details and status, it also offers you security tips as an added value. But for now, this is only available for BTC transactions.
Note that the transfer from Coinbase to Trezor takes a bit of time, and not pronto. Wait for a few seconds for your transaction to travel to your Trezor’s node. In case the notification says your transaction is ‘pending’, wait a while, just the same. How to transfer from Coinbase to Trezor works this way: Coinbase announces your send request to all the nodes on the network for Trezor’s node to pick it up. When Trezor’s node finally sees this transaction, the process of transfer begins, and you are informed of this through a ‘pending’ notification. Perhaps, the choice of the word ‘pending’ is appropriate for managing user expectations. But the idea there is that your wallets are keeping you in the loop every step of the way, so you’re assured of where your assets are. Learn more about Coinbase and Trezor here!
Conclusion
It’s best to keep these notes on how to transfer from Coinbase to Trezor handy. You’ll never know when you’ll finally be needing these at a time when your cryptocurrencies have spiked and grown, and there is a need to move to more secure and offline storage. You might want this up for bookmarking, along with your other cryptocurrency references, so that this interesting crypto landscape won’t be as intimidating.