Trezor Suite security, without the marketing

When you create a wallet, the private keys are generated on the device itself and are designed never to be exportable. The app on your computer — Suite, in any of its forms — never holds them. It reads public information from the blockchain, builds transactions for you to inspect, and hands them to the device to be signed.

That means a compromised laptop, a malicious browser extension or a stolen password still does not let anyone spend your coins. They would need you to confirm the transaction on the device, which is why the habit of reading the device screen is the most valuable thing you can learn on this site.

It also means the app can be installed, reinstalled and moved between computers freely. You can plug the same device into a different machine, add the accounts again from the device, and carry on. Nothing critical lives on the computer.

Self-custody moves the responsibility to you. The device protects the keys; it cannot protect you from a decision you make with your own hands.

The passphrase deserves particular care: a typo, or a lost capital letter, creates a different empty wallet, and your funds sit in a wallet you can no longer open. Write it down with the same discipline as the seed, and keep the two in different places so that a single find or a single fire does not take both.

For backups, the classic single seed is the simplest and still perfectly respectable option. On models that support it, a Shamir backup splits the secret into several shares with a threshold — say, any three of five — so no single location can be robbed for the whole wallet. Either way, test the backup before you rely on it: use the device's own check, and recover onto a spare device if you want certainty.

Wallet phishing has a few well-worn shapes: a fake "wallet validation" page that asks for your recovery words; a support agent who needs to "verify your ownership"; an email pretending to be a security alert with a link; an extension in a browser store that looks like a companion app. All of them want the same thing, and it is always the same 12–24 words.

To show your balances, Suite has to ask servers about your addresses. By default those are public backend services, which means whoever runs them can, in principle, group your addresses together and pair them with your IP address. Switching on Tor hides the IP; running your own node hides the queries. Neither makes your transactions private on the blockchain itself — that depends on how you use addresses, which is what coin control and fresh receiving addresses are for.

Two smaller points worth knowing. Buying crypto through an in-app partner normally involves identity verification, so the purchase is linked to you, even though the coins end up in your own account. And app analytics can be left off in settings — a one-line privacy win.

If you typed your seed into a website: assume the wallet is compromised. Create a new wallet on a trusted device, write down its new seed, and move your funds to it as quickly as network conditions allow. Do not reuse the old seed, and do not keep sending to the old addresses.

If your computer looks infected: do not sign transactions on it. Set up the new account from a different, clean machine, verify the destination on the device screen, and move the funds across.

If you lost your device but have your seed: buy a replacement, restore from the seed, and check that your accounts and balances return. Then wipe the old device from your list of worries.

If you lost the seed: there is no recovery path. Not through the manufacturer's support team, not through us, and not through any paid "recovery service" that offers to brute-force your words — those offers are aimed at people in exactly this position.