What is a crypto wallet?

Crypto Wallets

You can think of a crypto wallet as a wallet or bank account for various digital currencies. In technical terms a wallet is most likely just an address (a string) that identifies your "account" on the blockchain. Typically, you will use apps on your smartphone or inside your Browser to create a wallet. A crypto wallet also always comes with a public and private key. The private key is most important as it functions like a real key to your money inside the crypto wallet. Whoever has access to your private key also has access to your money and can do with it whatever he or she likes. You can store, send and receive crypto assets to other wallets. Your wallet also contains a public key, your wallet address. Like your IBAN you can safely give the public key to anyone, as it only serves as a kind of a receiving address.

Typically, wallet apps give you multiple wallet addresses. One for each supported blockchain. Therefore, wallets are blockchain-specific.

A very well-known and well-used browser wallet is Metamask (iOS, Android, Browser-Plugin). Another popular option is Trust Wallet, which is only available for smartphones (iOS & Android) though. Trust Wallet might be more beginner-friendly than MetaMask.

Seed Phrase

When you create a new wallet, you will be shown what is called a seed phrase. A seed phrase consists of a couple of random words (12-24) that kind of work like a recovery key to your wallet. Whenever you need to restore (get access) to your wallet on a new device or because you deleted your wallet app, you will need to enter this phrase to get access to your funds again.

It is highly recommended to save your seed phrase in a safe place. There is nothing more safe than writing all the words down multiple times on some pieces of paper and store these in a secure location.

Remember: If you lose your seed phrase and then lose your smartphone or delete the wallet app, you will never be able to access your coins and tokens anymore!

Never share your private key or seed phrase with anyone. If someone asks you for it, it's a scam! With the seed phrase, you can recover your wallet on any device and have full access to the assets it contains.