KeepKey Review – Bitcoin Hardware Wallet

KeepKey is a Bitcoin hardware wallet. It stores your private keys offline making it near impossible for hackers to steal your bitcoins using traditional means. In this keepkey review we unbox the wallet and show you how to receive and send bitcoins using the KeepKey chromium apps.

What is a Bitcoin Hardware Wallet?

A Hardware Bitcoin wallet means exactly that, a piece of hardware which acts as the wallet interface for your bitcoins. While Bitcoin as a network is secure, the way users store their private keys may not be. Imagine if you store your bitcoins on your personal computer and it gets infected with malware such as a keylogger or a clipboard virus. Your hard drive would get wiped clean in a matter of minutes if you had any substantial amount of bitcoin’s on it.

So how do we ensure that our bitcoins stay protected against malware and hackers? A hardware wallet does just that. By eliminating the operating system and any connection to the internet your bitcoins stay safe from any software based attack. A hardware wallet is also sometimes commonly seen as a 2FA (2 Factor Authentication) device since the user needs to physically confirm any transaction leaving the wallet, similarly to a Google Authy code which is required on sign in to certain platforms. In this KeepKey review we will show you how to get setup with the wallet in under 5 minutes.

Bitcoin Hardware Wallet KeepKey Review

We recently got our hands on the new Keep Key Bitcoin hardware wallet, it has been on the market for a few months and no major vulnerabilities have yet been reported. The software is also open source which is a huge plus for verifying the device’s security and privacy. The design is fantastic, the matte finish on the backside with the Keep Key logo is a nice touch and the LCD screen on the front is very bright and clear. One downside to this wallet is it’s price, priced at $239 on amazon it is an expensive alternative to the trezor – priced at $149 – and the Ledger Nano Hardware Wallet – priced at $39 on amazon. Checkout this chart for a comparison of all the popular software and hardware bitcoin wallets and reviews.

Setting up the KeepKey wallet took less than 5 minutes. Using the Chrome browser, you simply navigate to keepkeywallet.com which will redirect you to the google chrome app store. Download and install the KeepKey wallet plugin and the KeepKey proxy plugin, then click on the newly generated coin icon on the top right of the google chrome screen and initialize the keep key wallet. Once you set up your pin and copy the recovery sentence your wallet is setup! The process is very similar to the way one would setup the Ledger Nano Wallet.

One advantage that the KeepKey has against the Ledger wallet is the fact that the scrambled number pad is displayed directly on the KeepKey screen, unlike with the Ledger where the scrambled number pad shows up on the computer. As a result the KeepKey is more secure than the Ledger Wallet but at the same time it costs ten times more.

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