The Coincover team attended Bitcoin 2022 in Miami and met some of the industry experts. We caught up with Joe Mckeating, Founder, ATRIA, Onboarding the Next Billion Web3 Users and he shared his top tips for keeping safe when investing in crypto.

Video transcript

Joe McKeating:

The advice that I give people in crypto in terms of protecting their assets again comes down to education first.  

1. Every day’s a school day: Do your research

Make sure that you do your research. This is still a new space and it's really important to be researching all the products and applications that you're using. You can find a lot of information online. Twitter is a good place to look, even just in your search results. You'll see a lot of different reviews of these products. I also find LinkedIn to be a really. Interesting community and good place to find information right now.

2. Safety first: Look for extra security and protection

Make sure that you're choosing trusted partners and see what those partners are offering, so anti- theft protection is becoming more popular and I know Coincover offers that that so that would be an important thing to look into.  

3. Get cyber-savvy: Be aware of social engineering scams

I think even a bigger problem right now than the applications and the defy ecosystem itself is the same problem we see in Web2.0  with social engineering. So I'll give an example. One of the most popular browser extension applications or wallets in the world right now is called Metamask. It's not that Metamask itself is inherently insecure, but there are social engineering tactics and some someone might use some malicious to get access to someone's Metamask wallet. The Metamask website is Metamask.io. Maybe someone creates a site called metamat.io or metamask.net. Or something of that kind, gets high in the search rankings through creating good content and tricking the search algorithms. It is maybe on that first page where even though it's a small percentage, it could be a large number of people who click on that what they think is the Metamask link they ask for personally identifiable information. And because of that, give away access to a hacker to their wallet.  

4. Education, education, education: Keep learning and asking questions

But I think it all comes back to get us educated as you can right now, which at this point in the evolution of the industry falls a lot to the consumer. Whereas I think we're going to see that flip where the industry is going to make a much bigger push, a much bigger emphasis on the educational aspect of this. Because it can seem pretty complicated right now, once you break it down simply to actually fairly easy to understand, and certainly in a lot of cases. Easier to understand than our current financial system.