Month: July 2025

Key Takeaway

Pros

• Beginner friendly
• Afforable
• 25-year warranty
• Can generate with or without seed phrase
• Lightweight & portable

Cons

• No screen to confirm transactions
• High in-app fees
• Questionable customer support
• No HD Accounts
• Recent security scare

What‘s Inside The Box?

Tangem Card: A Sleek, Durable Plastic Card

Tangem comes with two or three cards out of the gate depending on which set you choose. By using NFC chips, the design is able to keep the replicate of the bank cards.

Although just a card, the hermetic plastic used to make it held up considerably well on a bend test. It is clear the company didn’t cheap out on material here.

Being a card, a major benefit is being able to slip the it directly into your wallet, bag and so on. And in that sense, Tangem is easier than other wallets to use as well.

A nice extra bonus with Tangem cards is that the brand has partnerships with other brands to make unique designs and art of the cards.

Different designs give a personal touch and a chance to onboard different communities. So far there have been cards made for Tron, Shiba, Kaspa and even some crypto influencers.

To show their faith in the product, Tangem offers a 25-year warranty, significantly longer than any other wallet brand.

Is Tangem The Quickest Setup In Crypto?

Tangem is the easiest setup we’ve come across yet, and that speed holds especially true even if you’re not an experienced crypto user. 

It’s worth mentioning that the Tangem app is mobile only, compatible with both Android and iOS.

When setting up Tangem wallet, there’s three different options for users: generate private key inside the wallet, generate with seed phrase or import existing seed phrase.

It can’t be recommended enough to always generate your hardware wallets with a seed phrase. Yes, it can be daunting and hold more personal responsibility, but it gives you more control and flexibility.

Once you choose your backup option, we need to back up all three cards to tapping the NFC chip on a mobile device.

If we lose one of our cards, we can use these spare backup cards as a ‘key’, allowing us the ability to access our wallet and crypto holdings.

Three cards is recommended if you do choose Tangem, because we can only recover the account if there are 2 of 3 cards (or 2 of 2).

Tangem App: Nothing Special, But Gets The Job Done

The UI and UX isn’t anything particularly special, but functionality-wise it has everything users need.

We can buy, sell, swap and stake our crypto in-app.

It’s also easy to view market conditions and add tokens to your list. 

Like most wallets, we can connect to dapps, but these integrations are seriously lacking. For more advanced users, other wallets may provide better options here.

Perhaps the biggest downside to Tangem is lack of Hierarchical deterministic (HD) accounts. Essentially this means we can only create one account or wallet per token. 

Just 1 Bitcoin wallet, 1 Ethereum wallet, 1 Solana wallet and so on. Other wallets such as Ledger and Trezor allow users to create many separate wallet addresses for different blockchains.

Which Crypto Tokens Does Tangem Support?

We can store thousands of different tokens on most major blockchains with Tangem. The brand also implemented NFT support for many popular chains.

Tangem Security: A Mixed Bag Of History

Tangem has never been hacked, but there was a recent scare where they were logging users’ private keys in support emails.

You can read more about that here and come to your own conclusions.

The card functions as a hardware wallet in two parts.

Firstly, the secure element EAL 6+ chip handles cryptographic actions, such as generating private keys. A NFC chip is also implanted inside the card allowing users to tap on their phone to confirm transactions.

Tangem makes it impossible for card firmware to be updated. But some experts believe this to be counterintuitive, leading to security issues.

There have been two third party audits for Tangem so far.

The first was in 2018 by the Swiss company Kudelski Security for the Tangem 1.0. Results stated “no backdoors or vulnerabilities, is not updatable, and contains no hidden algorithms”.

A second audit by Riscure in 2023 found similar results for the most recent Tangem 2.0 cards.

As for open sourcing, since the card uses a Samsung chip, this requires an NDA agreement. Long story short, that code is closed source.

But on a side note, the mobile app itself is open sourced, and can view their github here.

Tangem Reputation & Reviews

Tamgem was founded in 2017 in Zug, Switzerland. Between 2017 to 2021, the main reason you’ve never heard of this company is because they mostly worked in the B2B crypto market.

In 2021, Tangem pivoted to B2C, creating version 1.0 and the most recent Tangem 2.0 wallet we know today.

In terms of reviews, the wallet brand holds a 4.1 out of 5 on trustpilot.com, a 4.4 out of 5 on Amazon.com and a 4.0 out of 5 on Tangem’s website.

Here’s what users are saying about Tangem cards:

To get a true representation of Tangem’s reputation, consult their socials, check their metrics and read what other users and customers are saying.

Unfortunately, there is no live customer support, with the only way to be able to contract through email. There has been a concerning amount of negativity around proclaimed poor support for users. 

Tangem Cards Compared To Other Cold Wallets

How does the Tangem card ($70) differ from other popular hardware wallets we tested?

Tangem

• Tangem ring ($160): same as Tangem card

CoolWallet

• CoolWallet Go ($69): same as Tangem cards
• CoolWallet Pro ($149): weak battery, small screen, clunky, slow, better app

Ledger

• Ledger S Plus ($59): 2 buttons, better app, screened device
• Ledger X ($149): battery powered, bluetooth or USB-C connection, better, screened device
• Ledger Flex ($249): bluetooth or USB C, larger screen, additional features, better app
• Ledger Stax ($399): same as Flex, but with a curved screen and label binding

Trezor

• Trezor Safe 3 ($79): USB-C only, 2 buttons, similar app

OneKey

• OneKey Classic 1S ($99): USB-C or bluetooth, 4 buttons, bertter app

Safepal

• Safepal S1 ($50): QR code scanning, offline, better app

Cypherock

• Cypherock X1 ($149): USB-C only, joystick, 4 card backups, worse app

Secux

• Secux Neo X ($179): USB C or bluetooth, bulky, worse app

Final Thoughts: Tangem Is Good For Basic Crypto Tasks

After using Tangem for nearly 2 years now, the experience is solid.

If you are new to crypto, the wallet is a decent entry point to get started, as you do not need much knowledge in setup. And it literally takes just minutes.

The unique designs are a pretty cool bonus if you’re into the communities or images available.

Remember that since there is no screen to confirm transactions, it’s not as safe as hardware wallets that use a separate device to ensure there’s no malicious activity.

So, would I recommend the Tangem card?

I do still use the Tangem card but store miniscule amounts of crypto on it.

It’s not ridiculously expensive to purchase a set at around $62 USD (wait for their 20% off sales which come at the holidays), and it as a way to diversify some crypto holdings into a different wallet.

But to be blunt, the whole private key scandal linked above has made me quite worried about the security practices being used here. Only time will tell if something of that magnitude could happen again.

I personally like the ease of use, but choose to only store very small crypto amounts on Tangem.

If this a article helped, check out the link below to grab a Tangem wallet.

Thanks for reading and catch ya in the next one!