Zelcore

Crypto Security — Keep Your Assets Safe

Seed phrase hygiene, scam patterns, hardware wallets, and how to sleep at night.

Nearly every catastrophic crypto loss traces back to a handful of mistakes: the seed phrase stored wrong, a signature approved too fast, a copy-pasted address tampered with. These articles walk through each of them — what the attack looks like, why it works, and how to defend against it.

Smart-Account Gotchas: Recovery, Cross-Chain Address Drift, and Signing Schemes

Smart-Account Gotchas: Recovery, Cross-Chain Address Drift, and Signing Schemes

The operational pitfalls of smart accounts in 2026: cross-chain address drift, recovery models that fail closed, signing schemes that don't shake hands with hardware, and a checklist.

10 min read
Picking a Smart Wallet: Coinbase Smart Wallet, Safe, Argent, and the Field

Picking a Smart Wallet: Coinbase Smart Wallet, Safe, Argent, and the Field

A practical, opinionated comparison of Coinbase Smart Wallet, Safe, Argent, and the rest of the field — recovery models, chain coverage, and Zelcore pairing tips.

9 min read
EIP-7702: Upgrading Your EOA in Place — and the New Phishing Surface It Created

EIP-7702: Upgrading Your EOA in Place — and the New Phishing Surface It Created

EIP-7702 lets a normal EOA temporarily run smart-contract code at the same address. It is useful — and it created a new one-signature phishing class.

3 min read
ERC-4337 Architecture: EntryPoint, Bundlers, and Paymasters Without Tears

ERC-4337 Architecture: EntryPoint, Bundlers, and Paymasters Without Tears

A plain-spoken walkthrough of ERC-4337's six roles, the UserOperation struct, EntryPoint v0.6 vs v0.7, paymasters, and the public alt-mempool.

8 min read
Why EOAs Are Obsolete: What a Smart Account Actually Does

Why EOAs Are Obsolete: What a Smart Account Actually Does

BundleBear shows 1.07B UserOps and 56.7M smart accounts. Here is why an EOA is structurally limited and what a smart account does instead.

8 min read
Your Personal Custody Plan — A Decision Framework

Your Personal Custody Plan — A Decision Framework

A step-by-step framework for deciding where your assets actually live: thresholds for hot vs cold, when a passphrase or multi-sig layer is worth it, inheritance planning, and concrete example allocations.

8 min read
Your Attack Surface: Phishing, Clipboard Hijackers, Fake Apps, and SIM Swaps

Your Attack Surface: Phishing, Clipboard Hijackers, Fake Apps, and SIM Swaps

A practical catalogue of the top attacks on self-custody users — address poisoning, clipboard malware, fake wallet apps, and SIM swaps — with concrete mitigations for each.

9 min read
The 25th Word: How a Passphrase Adds a Second Layer

The 25th Word: How a Passphrase Adds a Second Layer

How BIP-39 passphrases create a fully separate hidden wallet, why they're the strongest defence against physical seed-phrase theft, the brutal failure modes, and when this is genuinely worth the risk.

7 min read
Hardware Wallets: What They Actually Protect Against — and What They Don't

Hardware Wallets: What They Actually Protect Against — and What They Don't

A clear-eyed threat model: what a secure element defends against, what it doesn't, and how to build self-custody habits that don't depend on false confidence.

8 min read
The Multi-Chain Custody Problem — One Seed, Many Ledgers

The Multi-Chain Custody Problem — One Seed, Many Ledgers

Why a single BIP-32/44 seed unlocks accounts across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and 80+ other chains in Zelcore — and the practical implications for address reuse, chain-specific metadata, and protecting your one point of failure.

8 min read
Seed Phrases in Depth: Derivation, Storage, and What Gets Wiped

Seed Phrases in Depth: Derivation, Storage, and What Gets Wiped

Beyond the basics: how BIP-39 encodes entropy, how PBKDF2 and BIP-32/44 derive every key, what survives a device reset, and the recovery failure modes nobody warns you about.

9 min read
"Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins" — What an Exchange Actually Holds

"Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins" — What an Exchange Actually Holds

Unpacks the difference between an IOU balance on an exchange and actual on-chain ownership, using concrete failures (FTX, Mt. Gox) to show what 'custodial' means in practice.

6 min read
    Crypto Security — Keep Your Assets Safe | Zelcore Academy