Cryptocurrency exchanges charge fees for trading and storing funds for their customers, but they are prone to hacks because they centralize the risk and store a part of their private keys online for real-time withdrawals. You can always purchase crypto from exchanges like Coinbase and Coinmama; however, once the transaction is complete, and if you don’t want to trade, you should send your funds to a wallet that gives you access to your private keys, preferably a hardware wallet. Ideally exchanges can be used to trade, but it's best not to leave funds lying idle there.

You do not need to manually generate the private key. Ledger does that for you, it uses a true random number generator (TRNG) embedded in the secure element to generate your private key. TRNGs use unpredictable means to generate numbers, like atmospheric noise for example, while PRNGs or pseudo random number generators use mathematical algorithms, which are completely computer-generated. PRNGs make the generated random numbers predictable, which is the case if you try to generate it manually or use a website like bitaddress.org. Software wallets use random algorithms for PRNGs. You can be sure that the private key generated by your recovery seed once you initialize your Ledger is completely secure and unpredictable. The secure element also stores the private keys for your crypto, so they’re secure and never leave the device.

An ideal hardware wallet is one that uses a secure element, or it would not be a vast improvement over a software wallet. ColdCard and Cobo Vault have open sourced their secure element, while Ledger has not.

Where to buy a cobo vault and what's the cost?

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