Cryptocurrencies are truly liberating – never before have individuals been able to take charge of their funds, independent of any financial institution. But if you are going to be your own bank you must also be your own security guard. At Stratis we have a set of best practices to help you safeguard your tokens. With these few simple steps you can enjoy all the benefits Stratis has to offer without any negative side effects.
Improving the security of your Stratis account relies on one basic principle – the more layers of security you can put between yourself and a potential hacker the better.
Ways to keep your wallet safe
- Keep your tokens offline (known as ‘cold storage’) either on your hard drive, on an external hard drive or send to Stratis Wallet on your computer for staking.
- Don’t forget to backup your wallet. Go to FILE > BACKUP WALLET. Best practice is to do this frequently onto several new or freshly formatted usb hard drives.
- Lock down your password. Good password security is essential in the cryptocurrency community – a long password with a mixture of numbers, letters and symbols is best and changing your passwords often can help security.
- Encrypt your Stratis wallet by going to SETTING > ENCRYPT wallet.
- Update your software to the latest version of the client. Get notified of updates by joining us on our Slack channel, Bitcointalk thread, or follow us on Twitter @stratisplatform
- Ensure your malware software is running full scans on a regular basis and is up to date.
- Most important: Write down or otherwise make sure you will always remember your password every time you change it. Most loses occur when people lock themselves out of their wallets.
Take Care Online
If you must keep tokens online – a popular practice is to only keep only small amounts of currency there for daily use. You should always use 2FA with online accounts and where possible, set up security alerts so that you can keep tabs on all login activity.
Did you know that most security breaches lie with human error? Vigilance is key. Be careful in forums to avoid revealing your identity together with your Stratis Address, use only trusted computers – no internet cafes or ‘family’ computers – and check your internet connection is secure.
Stratis is Designed for Security
We are working hard in the background to keep the entire Stratis platform as secure as possible. Let’s take a deeper look at what we are doing and how that works in our interests.
Stratis preserves the trusted, secure architecture of Bitcoin – by that we mean the ability to create a tamper-proof record of transactions by securing them cryptographically. This means that information can be committed to the Stratis blockchain with confidence. How we differ from Bitcoin is in the way in which we secure that information.
Bitcoin is 100% proof of work (POW) meaning miners carry out complex computations in order to write data to the blockchain, and generate new coins as a reward for doing so. However, Stratis has moved to 100% Proof of Stake (POS) whereby Stratis holders secure the Blockchain by holding tokens in their wallets, allowing them to mature (no transactions in 24 hours), and leaving the wallets open. Investors who ’stake’ their tokens in such a way can earn Stratis in reward – a bit like earning interest on their holdings. POS is fairer for all and several thousand times more cost effective than POW. It doesn’t require any mining equipment so it isn’t subject to spiraling running costs and mining centralisation.
Help the overall network security and start staking your tokens today. We are pleased to see that 50% of Stratis holders are already doing this – an unusually high number of investors! If you would like to join them and earn a little Stratis in the process, all the information you need to started can be found here.
STRATIS WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Stratis Platform Integrates with Microsoft Azure
In case you missed it, this was our big story over the weekend and you can read more about it at Tech Announcer and Cryptohustle
Freewallet
We are pleased to announce that Freewallet have included Stratis in their mobile wallet service. ‘Freewallets allow you to store and manage digital currencies with ease in the smart and beautiful mobile-first cryptocurrency wallets’. Please note this is third party software and not endorsed by Stratis. We are expecting apps to be available soon at Apple Mac store and Google Play.
That’s it for this issue but one final word before we go – we were really pleased to see Stratis remain stable during the recent Bitcoin price rise. It was one of very few cryptocurrencies to do so!
