Uncovering Impact of Mental Models towards Adoption of Multi-device Crypto-Wallets

Cryptocurrency users saw a sharp increase in different types of crypto wallets in the past decade. However, the emerging multi-device wallets, even with improved security guarantees over their single-device counterparts, are yet to receive proportionate adoption. This work presents a data-driven investigation into the perceptions of users towards multi-device wallets, using a survey of 357 crypto-wallet users. Our results revealed two significant groups among our participants-Newbies and Non-newbies. Our follow-up qualitative analysis, after educating, revealed a gap between the mental model for these participants and actual security guarantees. Furthermore, we investigated preferred default settings for crypto-wallets across our participants over different key-share distribution settings of multi-device wallets-the threat model considerations affected user preferences, signifying a need for contextualizing default settings. We identified concrete, actionable design avenues for future multi-device wallet developers to improve adoption.