Stellar news delivered weekly:

How to Store Lumens

You keep your savings in harder-to-use, more secure accounts, and you keep your spending cash in a less secure, easier-to-access location. Use a similar approach to stay secure on Stellar.

Hot vs Cold

Spread your token position across two tiers:

1. Cold Wallet - a "paper" or hardware wallet for cold storage (i.e. a savings account)

2. Hot Wallet - a less secure but more accessible wallet for crypto on hand (i.e. a checking account)

"A common practice...is to maintain two accounts: one offline account that securely holds the majority of your assets and another online account that holds only a few assets." - Stellar Dev Docs

Hot vs Cold

Cold Wallet

Buy and set up a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S. If it is too expensive for you or is on backorder, the next best option is to create a paper wallet. Transfer the majority of your lumens to your hardware or paper wallet. Note: always transfer ~2 lumens first to make sure you are performing a transaction correctly, and store your hardware/paper wallet backups in multiple locations.

Since an offline computer has no connection, it is extremely hard for someone without physical access to it to access the account’s keys. However, this also makes every transaction an extremely manual process. - Stellar Developer Docs

Cold Wallet

Hot Wallet

Transfer as many lumens as you would keep in your physical fiat wallet or checking account to a desktop wallet, mobile wallet, accessible paper wallet, or to an account generated with the Stellar Account Viewer with the secret key stored in a password manager likeKeePass.

Most transactions can be performed with the online account - Stellar Developer Docs

Hot Wallet

Balancing Act

Besides double-checking the balance annually or topping off your Hot Wallet, do not access your Cold Wallet. Use your Hot Wallet to work and play on the Stellar network so that, in case your activities expose you to some vulnerability like BlackWallet, you will likely only lose what you would lose if someone steals your wallet, not your entire XLM position.

You can think of this method like having both a bank vault and a cash register drawer. Most of the time the vault is closed and locked. It is only opened occasionally (and under specific procedures) to replenish a register drawer that is running low or to store excess funds from a register drawer that is overflowing. - Stellar Developer Docs

Balancing Act