ELI5 - What if Ledger or Trezor stops working?

It's a great question, and one that WE ALL need to know the answer to, and good news is that there's nothing to worry about.

The first thing you need to know is that cold storage wallets, or any crypto wallets for that matter, don't actually store your cryptocurrency. The wallets store the private keys that allow you access to those cryptocurrencies. You coins actually remain permanently based ON the associated blockchain, only YOU can access & move them because YOU are the one holding the private keys.

BUT, for example, if a hardware wallet like Ledger breaks or the company goes bust and Ledger Live goes down, what happens then?

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Fortunately, the majority of crypto wallets, both hardware and software work in what's called Open System. By that I mean that they've all been developed using THE SAME emergency protocol known as BIP-39.

So, even IF Ledger or Trezor or ANYTHING for that matter stop working, you can still acces all your tokens associated with that wallet by entering your seed phrase that is generated upon the creation of the wallet.

This seed phrase can be entered in any other compatible wallet for which there are... many!

Take this as a word of advice, don't keep your tokens on exchanges & get a cold storage to store them safely. Control your tokens, you know what they say, not your coins, not your crypto.

Keep your seed phrase safe, written somewhere only YOU know about & don't tell anybody about it.

As long as ONLY YOU know about your seed phrase and you don't click on links you don't know & are unfamiliar with, you are safe!