Client Stories
Accounts from holders who sat down with us and walked through their backup material — with permission, and with details changed where needed.
What clients say
"I kept my phrase on a laminated card inside a fire safe. The lamination had bubbled near word four, making the 'i' look like an 'l'. Ji-hoon spotted it during the legibility check before we even started comparing copies. I re-wrote that copy the same week."— Hye-jin R., full audit, March 2024
"The cross-check session was shorter than I expected, which was fine — I only needed confirmation after engraving a new steel plate. I would have appreciated a bit more explanation of the checksum deck during the visit, but the follow-up email covered it well."— David M., cross-check session, November 2024
"My wife and I hold jointly, and we had never compared our individual backup copies. Turns out we had written the passphrase hint differently on each. The annual review now includes a shared holder record we both sign."— Young-soo and Mei Lin T., annual review clients since 2023
"I came in anxious and left with a folder I actually trust. The report listed every discrepancy with a plain-English explanation. No jargon, no pressure to buy anything else."— Andreas V., full audit, July 2025
Extended story: The three notebooks
A client arrived in early 2023 with three spiral notebooks, each supposedly containing the same twelve words. He had written them at different times over two years — after initial setup, after a firmware update scare, and after moving apartments.
During the cross-check, word nine differed across all three notebooks. The client insisted he had copied carefully each time. We traced the issue to a homophone: he had written “jelly” instead of the BIP39 word “jealous” in the earliest notebook, then faithfully copied the error twice more because he read from the previous copy rather than the device.
The fix took forty minutes. The client re-derived on our air-gapped test device, confirmed the correct word, and re-wrote all three notebooks under supervision. He now schedules an annual review and keeps only two copies instead of three — fewer copies means fewer chances to propagate an error.
Extended story: The estate binder
An elderly holder wanted her daughter to be able to recover funds if something happened to her. She had a passphrase in addition to her twelve words, stored separately. The daughter’s copy of the passphrase instruction sheet used an old apartment number as a reference clue, but the mother had moved twice since writing it.
We helped the mother update the clue language without changing the passphrase itself, documented the storage locations in the holder report, and provided a sealed envelope procedure for the daughter. The daughter attended the final thirty minutes of the session to understand the process — without seeing the phrase or passphrase.
This is the kind of work we find most meaningful: making recovery possible for someone other than the original holder.