Is Arculus Wallet good for cold storage of crypto?

As much as you need to ensure you’re investing in the right crypto, you need to also ensure your investments are stored safely. The best way to keep your funds safe is via a hardware wallet, but which hardware wallet is best?

You may want to compare the most popular hardware wallets of Ledger and Trezor, but also the Arculus Wallet is something you should look into.

In this article, we’ll discuss the Arculus Wallet and see if it is a good crypto wallet for cold storage.

What is the Arculus Wallet?

Developed by CompoSecure, the Arculus Wallet is a new cold storage wallet solution you can use for securing your crypto.

The name Arculus finds its roots in the Ancient Roman language where it referred to the guardian god of strongboxes and safes. The wallet aims to stay true to the name by providing a safe haven for your crypto.

With the Arculus Wallet App and the Arculus Key Card, CompoSecure leverages its expertise in financial payments and security hardware to safeguard the digital assets and identities of users.

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How does the Arculus Wallet work?

If you’ve used cold storage wallets in the past, you would know how most of them have physical devices you can connect with your system or mobile. And that’s fine but not very convenient.

With Arculus, however, convenience is the key—or actually the key card. Yes, the Arculus Key Card makes use of the NFC technology to authorize transactions much like your debit/credit card would. With a metal finish, the card looks pretty cool for a hardware wallet.

But before you can use it, you need to download the Arculus Wallet App on your mobile phone. Note that you need a device that supports NFC so if your phone doesn’t you would need to buy one that does. Luckily, most androids and iPhones do support NFC.

Once you’ve installed the app, you need to open it and tap and hold the Arculus Key Card against your device. You would then get an option to either create a new wallet or restore an old wallet. Since you’re reading this, creating a new wallet makes more sense.

The app should guide you through the rest of the process. Make sure that you note down your 12-word seed phrase in the sheet provided so you don’t lose it. You might want to make a few copies of it just to be sure. Never share that seedphrase with anyone or store it anywhere digital that can be accessed online.

Once done, you can set up your wallet for different cryptocurrencies within the app.

Seriously, write down your seedphrase. If you lose your wallet and don’t have that phrase – no one can help you recover your crypto. Also, if anyone gains access to that phrase – they gain access to your crypto. So don’t store it in your email or anywhere digital. Write it down and put it in a safe. Ok, hope that’s clear. Moving on 🙂

What crypto does the Arculus Wallet support?

Here’s where one of the biggest drawbacks of using Arculus arises: it supports only 41 cryptocurrencies (at the time of writing this article).

That’s far less than Ledger or Trezor, but if you actually check their website for the full list of supported crypto, you would see that Arculus does support most major cryptocurrencies. If you use those currencies, you would be happy with the Arculus Wallet.

There are plans for adding more cryptocurrencies, so if your favorite crypto isn’t on the list, chances are it might be added soon.

What fees does Arculus Wallet charge?

While Arculus doesn’t charge any fee to send or receive cryptocurrency, transfer fees applicable to your blockchain would apply. So, if you’re sending ETH from your wallet, you would still have to pay the gas. Similar to making a transfer from Metamask, it’s possible to control the fee to an extent by altering the speed of the transaction. But that’s all there is to it.

The fee you end up paying goes directly to the network and not to Arculus.

Can you use Arculus Wallet with Coinbase?

While the Arculus Wallet itself is pretty safe and rugged, you might already have a wallet elsewhere, like Coinbase or MetaMask. In that case, if you want your Arculus to be the main point of storage, it’s best to transfer your crypto to the Arculus Wallet.

There’s really no way for you to authorize transactions happening on Coinbase or MetaMask with your Arculus Key Card.

This incompatibility with the most popular wallets like MetaMask and Coinbase wallet may be a deal-breaker for some users. If that’s the case, check out our Ledger vs Trezor comparison. 

How secure is the Arculus Wallet?

Being a cold storage wallet, the Arculus Wallet is, by nature, pretty safe. Even with the tap-to-transact card, it remains safe. Since your crypto is stored offline, the chances of hacks are nullified. Most cold storage wallets have screens, physical buttons, and whatnot. Arculus on the other hand just relies on a card. This makes it a little less versatile, and necessary to pair with an app, but the card itself is less susceptible to damage.

Adding to that, it uses a three-factor authentication system: card, code, and biometric screening. The card itself features EAL 6+ embedded secure element.

That said, you could still lose your crypto if you authorize it to carry out transactions on shady websites. The card will do what it’s told, so don’t sign any transactions using your code that don’t appear safe. 

Arculus Wallet vs Ledger

Both Arculus Wallet and the Ledger devices have their pros and cons

. While the Arculus Wallet leads in appearance and ease of use, the Ledger devices boast support for a lot more cryptocurrencies and a connection with Metamask, Coinbase Wallet, and many popular DeFi apps. 

These are both amazing products and we highly recommend a hardware wallet for anyone in the crypto space. Seriously, any hardware wallet is better than no hardware wallet.

That said, if you’re in it for the looks or want a cold storage wallet that you can carry around anywhere, you should go for the Arculus ecosystem.

If instead there’s a cryptocurrency you own that you can’t find on Arculus or you want to connect with most DeFi applications, you might want to go for the Ledger ecosystem.

There’s no problem in having both either 🙂

Conclusion

When most people think about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, they imagine spectacled geeks with unkempt beards. The Arculus Wallet, with its metallic Key Card, is here to challenge that. It’s here to bring style and safety to the blockchain space.

With this article, we’ve tried to help you understand if the Arculus Wallet is a good cold storage crypto wallet. We hope it helped. Thanks for reading and stay safe!