Tangem vs Trezor and Ledger: Which Is Actually Safer

This comparison looks at where people actually lose their crypto. Most people think hacks are the biggest threat, but the numbers show something different. I also covered this in my video on which wallet is actually safer.

How people actually lose their crypto

Reports from companies like Chainalysis show that most losses come from user mistakes, not hackers. Direct hacks where the user did nothing wrong are very rare for regular users with basic security. The biggest category is users getting tricked into giving up their information through phishing emails, fake websites, fake SMS. Over 150,000 wallets were drained this way in 2025.

This biggest category, getting tricked, ties back to how certain wallets work.

The risks with seed phrase wallets

Seed phrases are the 24-word list you get when setting up Ledger or Trezor. They give access to your private key and funds, which makes them the main target for scammers. The whole job of phishing attacks is to trick you into sharing those words.

The concept of seed phrases is too confusing, especially for beginners. These wallets are safe when used correctly, but the way seed phrases work mixed with how people behave online, it is not foolproof.

There is another risk: firmware updates. When the company updates the device's firmware, if someone at the company gets hacked, they have the ability to push malicious code into wallets through those updates, even if you did everything right.

This has happened. In late 2023, a former Ledger employee got phished, hackers pushed bad code into the Ledger Connect Kit, and at least $600,000 was drained from users. The Ledger devices were not directly hacked, but the surrounding software was. More on Ledger's security track record in our Ledger review.

What Tangem avoids and the risks Tangem has

Tangem cards cannot be updated, so they avoid the firmware backdoor risk entirely.

For seed phrases, Tangem lets users choose the seed phrase route like other wallets, or the seedless route Tangem recommends. In seedless mode, the user does not get a seed phrase at all. The private key is stored inside two or three physical cards kept in separate locations. So the user cannot make the same seed phrase mistakes. Full Tangem review with setup details.

But Tangem has its own risks:

• Losing the cards: If you lose all your cards and your PIN code, you are locked out permanently.
• Blind signing: No screen on the cards. When making transactions on the phone, the details are only shown on the phone and you have to trust they are accurate. Theoretically, if your phone is hacked, a hacker could swap the displayed address. This has never happened to any Tangem user. Very difficult to pull off, and Tangem has dedicated security features against it. But the risk exists in theory.
• The tearing attack: Ledger's security team showed in 2025 that they found a way to brute force the PIN code with physical access to a Tangem card, eventually cracking easy 4-digit PINs in about an hour. An 8-digit PIN takes 460 days to crack. The required equipment is not something most thieves have. This risk is extremely small and avoidable with an 8-digit PIN.

The risk comparison

With seed phrase wallets like Ledger and Trezor, risk sits in two places: partly with the company (firmware issues can happen even if you do everything right; here Trezor gets credit for being fully open source so the community can validate the code), and partly with you managing the seed phrase correctly without getting scammed.

The numbers tell the story: 80 to 90 percent of user losses come from mistakes tied to how confusing seed phrases are to manage.

Tangem in seedless mode cuts out almost all of that seed phrase risk. The risk instead shifts to keeping your phone clean of viruses (which has never led to a Tangem user losing funds so far) and keeping your physical cards safe.

My conclusion

When you compare the numbers, using a Tangem wallet avoids so many user mistakes that it can be between 5 and 10 times safer than seed phrase wallets in practice, just by looking at how people actually lose crypto today.

That does not mean Ledger and Trezor are bad wallets. They are well-built and reliable. But if you are honest about where the real risks are, the seedless approach removes most of them.