Everyone currently in crypto world knows that you own a currency until you own a private key. In simple words cold storage is to store wallets private key in either digitally or in print format. Many also refer it as cold wallet.Mostly all crypto currencies have cold wallet feature except few.
Cryptocurrency wallets are different compared to traditional wallets due to its involvement of storing public and private keys, that helps and become path of accessing currency rather then access of currency itself.
What lesson we learn from this?
It’s important to store cryptocurrency away from exchanges and hosted wallets. If we are not doing this ,we are taking the risk of lossing access to our cryptocurrency.
Why is it important to to do cold storage of cryptocurrency?
Exchanges and third-party wallets hold your private keys on our behalf in their server , this makes our currency vulnerable if anything goes wrong with their servers so we are taking chance with our wealth in someone else hand.
Cold storage makes us take control in our own hand.
Different types of cold storage options?
Paper wallets & Hardware wallets
Paper wallets :
Paper wallet contains a pair of private/public keys printed on a piece of paper, with QR code.
Investopedia has explained paper-wallet in very detail manner, kindly look into it.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/paper-wallet.asp
Do different cryptocurrencies have different paper wallets?
Yes, different cryptocurrencies have different paper wallets, below i will mention few paper wallets.
Hardware wallets:
A hardware wallet is a special type of hardware wallet which stores the user's private keys in a secure hardware device.
Few advantages
Secure :
Private keys are stored in a protected area of a microcontroller !
Immune to computer viruses!
Can be used securely and interactively!
Different Hardware wallets
Cryptowallet hardware.
https://www.cryptohwwallet.com
5 best crypto wallets - bitcoin
https://themerkle.com/top-5-safe-bitcoin-wallets/
Etherium Cryptohardware wallets
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/ethereum/hardware-wallets/