Ethereum Wallets and What is MetaMask?
Wallet in the internet world somewhat holds the same functionality as a physical wallet. An Ethereum wallet is an application that helps in managing Ethereum accounts, your accounts and it is basically a gateway to the Ethereum network. The best part of wallets is that we can change them very easily for instance if I have already created my wallet but want to switch to another one so I can easily export my private keys and import them in a new wallet.
Some of the best Ethereum Wallets can be listed as follows:
1. TrezorOne: Famous for its security as brute-force attack is impossible. It supports multiple cryptocurrencies like litecoin, bitcoin, Dash etc.
2. Meta Mask: For someone who ain’t an expert, MetaMask is the best option, it is available as a chrome extension as well. Moreover, we can use it to interact with our Ethereum test net too.
3. Jaxx: It is multiplatform and supports multicurrencies. It is a good option as it provides simple interface for users. Can be installed as desktop or mobile wallet.
So, let’s get started with MetaMask.
Meta Mask is simply a bridge which helps you to interact with Ethereum or the decentralized internet through browser extension or mobile app.
We can simply download MetaMask as our chrome browser extension from chrome web store. After that, we get two options: either to import existing wallet or to create a new one.
Creating a wallet in MetaMask:
After creating password, we will be directed to a page which contains secret backup phrase of 12 english words.
This phrase is very important for wallet recovery. It should be kept safe otherwise anyone can access our wallet and steal our money. After this we are finally connected to our main network.
We will see a page like this and we can see that we are connected to Ethereum main net at the top right.
We have zero ethers right now so we will switch our network to Ropsten Test Network. Then click on buy as we want free ethers from testing faucet.
Now request for an ether from faucet and we can see a transaction created by faucet for us.
So by now we have understood about test ethers and MetaMask setup.
Creating a smart contract:
Now I’ll be creating a simple bank smart contract in Remix IDE which looks like this:
Now its time to compile our code inorder to convert it into bytecode which will work for our virtual machine or ethereum network.
Now after that we will click deploy and will get a message like this:
In our code we have initialized our balance as 1 therefore by clicking get balance we get 1 balance now if we deposit 100 so total balance will be 101.
So we have finally created our smart contract and it is also working properly.
