Why Do I Need So Many NFT Wallets?
Navigating the Insane NFT Wallet Situation
If you haven’t bought any NFTs yet, brace yourself… you will need to have quite a few wallets to navigate the NFT waters. If you have already bought some NFTs, you’ve probably noticed that you have to have a million wallets!
There are three main reasons why:
- There are different blockchains — different blockchains require different wallets.
- The industry is new, so there are lots of wallet projects and there is no one clear winner and competition is high!
- Projects usually pick 1 wallet option to work with their site because they don’t development resources to accommodate multiple wallets at this stage in the industry.
Understanding the Different Blockchains
You can think of the different blockchains like the operating systems on the iPhones vs. Android Google phones. Your Android Google phone apps won’t work on your iPhone and vs. versa — as the phones are physically separate. The different blockchains are quite the same. They are physically separate entities that are built with custom technology for each. Here is a brief overview of the blockchains you will need separate wallets for:
Bitcoin Blockchain: This is not an NFT blockchain, but it’s worth calling out that Bitcoin is a blockchain that requires its own wallet. You can not have an NFT on this blockchain because it was built prior to the concept of smart contracts, which is the basis of NFTs.
Ethereum Blockchain: This is the OG NFT blockchain. The creators of this blockchain created the concept of NFTs… and now we are here! This blockchain has the most projects built on it and, subsequently, the most wallets on it as well. As mentioned before, projects usually pick 1 wallet provider to host the project’s NFTs in. This is because every wallet that gets added to the project adds more time for the development team. In an industry where all of the projects need to spend 100% of their resources optimizing their own product and not accommodating new wallets for their project.
If you have an NFT in a wallet, you can transfer that NFT to any other Ethereum based wallet. However, once you visit the project’s site again without your NFT in the wallet that works with that project, your NFT will not show in the project’s website. The project’s website will be looking for your NFT in that specified wallet.
Flow Blockchain: This is a new blockchain that optimized its tech for lots of small NFT transactions. The transactions also happen a bit faster than the Ethereum blockchain. Because it is new, there are not many projects built on it yet and they only have 3 wallets that work on the blockchain as of Spring 2021. As more projects are built on the blockchain, expect to see more wallets pop up here as well. The biggest project on the Flow blockchain as of Spring 2021 is NBA Top Shot. So if you have an NFT in NBA Top Shot, you will not be able to transfer the NFTs to any Ethereum based wallets because it is a Flow NFT.
WAX Blockchain: This blockchain was also built custom tailored to the specific needs of NFTs and Defi (decentralized finance). This means there are two types of applications being built on it. They have quite a few game projects on their blockchain, which we will cover in our Buying for the First Time section. Here is a handy article written on the types of wallets that work on the WAX blockchain, in case you were interested!
Algorand Blockchain: This blockchain states that it is the most efficient blockchain out there. It is said that it can scale, with transactions taking ~10 seconds. It is also one of the most secure, making it difficult to get hacked. It achieves both, scale and security, in a way that maintains decentralized miners approving the transactions. For more reading, check out this article on Ledger Academy (You may also notice ledger is a wallet that has different wallets on most of the blockchains mentioned here!) Algorand was not built to tailor to any specific type of blockchain project. It does allow for NFTs, but there are no major NFT projects on it as of Spring 2021. The projects on this blockchain are primarily Defi. You will need an Algo Wallet to make any purchases on this blockchain.
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