Key facts
- The paper card in the box is the weakest part of your setup. The wallet itself is built to survive attack. The card that unlocks it is not built to survive anything.
- Thailand is unusually hard on paper. Humidity that never really lets up, an annual flood season, and termites that treat a paper card as food. None of that is hypothetical here.
- Steel fixes the environment problem — not the secrecy problem. A steel backup survives fire and water. It does nothing about someone finding it, so where you hide it still matters.
- How you mark the metal matters more than which brand you buy. Stamping, engraving and slide-in tiles all work. Stamping and engraving are permanent, so a mistake is permanent too.
- Two copies in two places beats one perfect copy. A single backup, however indestructible, is still a single address that can flood or burn.
- Under BIP39 you only need the first four letters of each word. That is a quarter of the marking work, with less chance of an error.
- Nobody legitimate will ever ask for your recovery phrase. Not SIAMBC, not the manufacturer, not for a warranty claim or a firmware update. Ever.
The weakest part of a hardware wallet
Spend a few thousand baht on a hardware wallet and you get a genuinely impressive object. A certified secure element. A screen you verify transactions on. Firmware that assumes the computer it is plugged into is already compromised. Every part of it is designed on the assumption that someone is trying to take your crypto.
Then you open the box and find a small card of paper, and you are asked to write twenty-four words on it in ballpoint pen.
That card is the wallet. Not the device — the card. Lose the device and you buy another one, type the words in, and your crypto reappears. Lose the words and nothing else matters. The most secure hardware in the world is sitting behind a piece of stationery.
This is not a criticism of the manufacturers. There is no better object to put in a box at that price. But almost nobody upgrades from it, and the gap between how much thought went into the device and how much went into the card is the single largest weakness in most people's setup.
What Thailand does to paper
Most advice about seed phrase storage is written for a temperate climate and a dry house. It does not travel well to Bangkok.
Humidity. Paper here does not stay dry. It absorbs moisture from the air, expands and contracts with it, and ink migrates. A card in a drawer for five years does not look like a card that has been in a drawer for five years in London. Ballpoint fares better than gel or fountain pen, but the paper itself is the problem, not just the ink.
Water. Flooding is a routine feature of life in much of this country, not a freak event. Anyone who lived through 2011 knows what a ground floor looks like afterwards. A backup in a bottom drawer, a safe on the floor, or a box under the bed is a backup stored at exactly the height that floods first.
Termites. This is the one people outside the region find surprising, and it is the one we see most. Termites eat cellulose. Paper is cellulose. A card left undisturbed for years in a wooden drawer, a cupboard, or a box in a storage room is not sitting somewhere safe — it is sitting somewhere quiet, which is exactly where termites work. We have had customers come into the shop with an envelope that turned out to be lace.
Fire. Less specific to Thailand, but worth stating plainly: paper ignites long before anything else in a house fire is in real trouble. A fireproof document box helps, and the good ones are rated for paper. Many cheap ones are not.
Any one of these is survivable if you have a second copy. The problem is that most people have exactly one, on paper, in a drawer.
What steel fixes, and what it does not
A metal backup solves the entire environmental category at once. It does not burn at the temperatures a house fire reaches, it does not care about water, humidity does not touch it, and no insect has any interest in it. That is the whole pitch, and it is a good one.
What it does not solve is secrecy. A steel plate is not a safe. If someone finds it and can read it, they have your crypto, exactly as if they had found the paper card. Metal buys you durability, not concealment — and the two problems need different answers. Durability you buy. Concealment you have to think about, and we come back to it below.
It also does not solve you making a mistake. A wrongly stamped letter in metal is considerably harder to fix than a crossed-out word on paper.
Stamping, engraving, or tiles
There are three ways to get your words onto metal, and the choice matters more than the brand on the box.
Stamping
You place a steel letter punch on the plate and hit it with a hammer. The letters are deep, even, and permanent. It is the most durable result and the most satisfying to do. It is also loud, and it is unforgiving — a punch that lands crooked stays crooked.
Engraving
You scratch the letters in with a hardened tip, like writing with a very stiff pen. Quiet, no hammer, no setup, and you can do it on a table at midnight without anyone noticing. The letters are shallower than stamped ones but perfectly readable, and it is far more forgiving to start with.
Tiles
Instead of marking anything, you slot pre-engraved letter tiles into a holder to spell out your phrase. Nothing is permanent until you close the unit, so a mistake costs you ten seconds rather than a plate. It is the most expensive approach and the one we recommend to anyone nervous about doing this once and getting it right.
One thing that applies to all three: under the BIP39 standard, the first four letters of any word identify it uniquely. Abandon and ability differ inside four characters, and so does every other pair in the list. You can mark ABAN instead of ABANDON and restore from it perfectly. That is roughly a quarter of the work and a quarter of the opportunities to make an error.
The four options we stock
All four are grade 316 stainless — the marine grade used in shipbuilding, chosen for corrosion resistance — and all four hold a standard BIP39 phrase. They differ in how you mark them, how big they are, and how hard they are to open.
CryptoSafe
฿299 ฿690-57%
- 86 x 54 x 2.5 mm — credit-card sized, fits where a card fits
- Holds a full 24-word BIP39 phrase, marked in by you
- Rated to withstand fire up to 1000°C for 30 to 60 minutes
Adding: Plate only. Sets with pen, stamp and hammer are on the product page.
The starting point, and the one most people should buy first. It is a single heavy-gauge plate you mark yourself, at a price where making a second copy for a second location is an easy decision rather than an agonising one. Pick the set that includes the tool you want to use — the plate does not mark itself.
CryptoSafe
฿1,790 ฿2,990-40%
- Slide-in pre-engraved tiles — no hammer, no engraver, no crooked strikes
- Holds 12 to 24 words, up to 96 characters
- Rated to withstand fire up to 1500°C for 10 to 12 hours
The one to buy if the idea of permanently stamping a mistake into metal is what has been stopping you. Nothing is fixed until you close it, and the fire rating is in a different class to the Lite — hours rather than minutes.
CryptoSafe
฿1,990 ฿3,990-50%
- Engraved tiles threaded onto a rod inside a sealed steel tube
- Holds 12 to 24 words, up to 123 characters — full printable ASCII
- 102 mm long, around 90 g. Rated to withstand fire up to 1500°C
The most hideable of the four, and the only one that is not obviously a crypto backup at a glance. A flat plate looks like what it is; a small metal tube does not, and it fits places a plate will not. Because it takes any printable character rather than just BIP39 words, it also stores passwords and private keys.
CryptoSafe
฿1,290 ฿1,990-35%
- Multi-plate vault — split a long phrase so no single plate holds everything
- Outer plates shield the marked surfaces; tamper-resistant screws
- Approximately 152 x 35 x 89 mm, around 142 g
Built to be closed and forgotten. The reason to split a phrase across inner plates is that no single plate is then a complete copy of your backup — which matters if one is ever seen, photographed, or handled by someone who should not have seen it.
Where to keep it once it is made
This is the part people skip, and it is at least as important as which plate you bought.
Make two, and separate them. One backup in one building is a single point of failure no matter what it is made of. A fire, a burglary or a flood at one address should not end your position. Two locations you control — home and office, or your place and a relative's — is the simplest meaningful improvement most people can make.
Get it off the floor. If flooding is plausible where you live, height is free protection.
Do not store it with the wallet. A drawer containing both the device and the phrase that unlocks it is one drawer someone has to find.
Think about who finds it by accident. Not just burglars — movers, cleaners, family, a landlord, a contractor. Most losses we hear about are not sophisticated attacks. They are ordinary people finding something they were not supposed to see.
Never photograph it. A photo of your backup is on your phone, and therefore in your cloud backup, and therefore protected by nothing more than your email password. This is a very common way for crypto to disappear.
Mistakes we see in the shop
Writing the words in the wrong order. The order is part of the phrase. Number them.
Marking all the letters when four would do. More characters means more chances to mis-strike, for no benefit.
Not checking before committing. Lay the punches out, read the whole word, then hit. Metal cannot be un-marked.
Testing the backup by typing it into a phone. If you want to verify a backup, restore it onto a hardware wallet, not into a software wallet or a website. A "seed phrase checker" website is a theft mechanism, without exception.
Buying one plate and stopping. The second copy is the one that saves you.
Leaving the paper card in the box afterwards. Once the steel is made and verified, the paper card is a liability sitting in a drawer. Destroy it properly.
Common questions
Do I need a steel backup if I only hold a small amount?
The honest answer is that it depends on whether the amount is small enough that you would genuinely not mind losing it. A backup costs a few hundred baht at the Lite end. Most people find the maths obvious once they put an actual number on what is behind the phrase.
Which one should I start with?
The Lite, for most people. It holds the same phrase as the others, and at that price you can buy two and store them in different places — which does more for your safety than a single more expensive plate in one location.
Will these work with my wallet?
Any wallet that gives you a BIP39 recovery phrase, which is almost all of them — Ledger, Trezor, SafePal, OneKey, Blockstream Jade, Keystone and others. Tangem is the exception worth naming: it uses a card-based backup and an access code rather than a written phrase, so there is nothing to stamp.
Can I store a passphrase or a private key too?
On the Capsule, yes — it takes any printable character rather than only BIP39 words. The plate-based products are designed around the word list.
Is a bank safe deposit box better?
It is a good second location, not a good only location. You cannot get to it at 2am, and you are trusting an institution to still be there and still be accessible. Many people keep one copy at home and one in a box.
Someone from support asked me to confirm my recovery phrase. Is that normal?
No. It is a scam, every time, with no exceptions. Neither SIAMBC nor any manufacturer will ever ask for your recovery phrase — not for a warranty claim, not for identity verification, not for a firmware update, not to "migrate" your wallet. Whoever has those words owns your crypto, and it can never be recovered.
Buying in Thailand
We stock all four CryptoSafe models at our shop in Thawi Watthana, Bangkok, and ship free anywhere in Thailand in one to three days. In Bangkok we can send same-day by Grab or LINEMAN — message us on LINE to arrange it.
If you would rather see them in person before deciding, come in. It is much easier to tell whether you want to stamp, engrave or slot in tiles when the plates are in front of you, and we will show you how each one works. We are open Monday to Saturday, 9:00 to 17:00.
See all CryptoSafe backups or ask us anything before you buy — we would rather answer first than have you mark the wrong thing into metal.
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