The Five Gaps I See in Nearly Every Setup
Dee Skillicorn
Founder, Digi-Secure
After enough years of coaching calls and enough evenings standing in front of a room, a pattern sets in whether you go looking for it or not. I have sat with hundreds of crypto holders by now, and the vast majority of them are careful people. Thoughtful, capable, well ahead of the average investor.
And yet when we actually sit down and look under the bonnet together, nearly every single setup has at least one of the same five gaps sitting in it. None of this is a criticism. It is simply what happens to a setup that was put together properly once and then left to get on with life alongside everything else you are juggling.
Here they are, plainly, so you can run your own setup over each one as you read.
A recovery plan that lives only in your head
Ask most holders how they would recover their wallet if their phone was lost tomorrow, and they will describe a process rather than show you one. It sits in their memory, not on paper or anywhere written down properly. That works right up until the day it is needed under pressure, at which point a plan that only exists in your head is no plan at all.
The fix: Write the actual steps down, store them properly, and test that you can follow your own instructions before you ever need to.
A seed phrase stored somewhere it should not be
A photo on a phone. A note saved in the cloud. A password manager that also holds the phrase to the account protecting everything else. Every one of these felt sensible on the evening it was set up, and every one of them is a single point of failure waiting for the wrong person to find it. This one happens for a genuinely good reason, convenience matters and nobody wants to lose access to their own money.
The fix: A proper offline backup, ideally more than one, kept away from anything connected to the internet.
Too much sitting on an exchange
Exchanges are useful and I am not suggesting anyone avoid them altogether. But holding is not the same job as trading, and a balance left sitting there long after the trading is done is a balance you do not actually control. It happens because moving it feels like a task for another day, and another day has a habit of never quite arriving.
The fix: Move what you are holding for the long term into a wallet only you control, and keep the exchange for what it is genuinely for.
No plan for family access
The same care that keeps your crypto safe from strangers tends to keep it just as safely away from your own family. Most people have thought carefully about security and never once thought about what happens to that security if they are no longer the one managing it. It is an uncomfortable thing to sit with, which is exactly why it gets pushed down the list.
The fix: This does not mean weakening anything, it means arranging proper, secure access for the people you trust, so the same protection that shuts strangers out does not shut your family out too.
A setup last looked at years ago
This is the one underneath most of the others. A setup built two or three years ago, on an old phone, with an old habit or two baked in, that has simply never been revisited since. Nothing dramatic went wrong, life just moved on and the setup stayed exactly where it was.
The fix: It is a proper once a year look, checking every piece against how you actually hold and use your crypto today rather than how you did back when you first set it up.
If you read through those five and recognised even one of them in your own setup, you are in good company. I would go as far as saying most people reading this will recognise at least two. The good news is that every one of these gaps has a straightforward fix once you know it is there, which is really the whole point of naming them plainly like this rather than leaving them vague and easy to ignore.
If you want to check your own setup properly rather than just against a list, I have put together a free Security Checklist. If more than three come back no, that is worth a proper conversation.
Run Your Setup Against the Checklist
Download the free Digi-Secure Security Checklist, or book a one-on-one coaching call to audit your setup under real-world pressure.
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