My First Wallet: Crypto Wallets for Beginners

Published in

Ava Protocol

5 min readJun 3, 2022

If you are new to cryptocurrency and the Polkadot ecosystem it’s normal to experience an overwhelming feeling. It can be difficult to understand where to begin. A great place to start is understanding what a crypto wallet is and how to safely set one up. This article will give a beginner introduction to wallets.

What is a wallet?

A cryptocurrency wallet allows a user to store and transfer digital assets such as cryptocurrency tokens (BTC, ETH, DOT) or NFT’s. From a functional perspective — a wallet can be viewed as an online bank account with a few key differences.

Crypto wallets come in a variety of different forms such as software or hardware, often with different levels of security and complexity — it can be difficult for even advanced users to determine which wallet or multiple wallets are appropriate for their needs.

To evaluate which wallet is appropriate for yourself it’s important to understand the differentiation between non-custodial wallets and custodial wallets.

Custodial crypto wallets

Custodial wallets are wallet services created by businesses and institutions such as centralized crypto currency exchanges. The user outsources custody of their important private keys in exchange for benefits such as higher convenience and less user responsibility and security requirements. The user however places trust in the business or organization to keep the private keys and their assets safe. While there are advantages to using a custodial wallet — this trust-based relationship creates potential for problems.

Non-custodial wallets

Non-custodial wallets are inherently more secure than custodial wallets — though they require significantly more responsibility from the user to be set up and managed correctly. When using a non-custodial wallet, the user must manage their own account credentials. If you lose your private key and account information, your wallet and assets will be unrecoverable. While using a non-custodial wallet may have risks, these risks can be effectively managed by using practices to protect your private keys.

Many cryptocurrency communities advocate strongly for the use of non-custodial wallets. The flexibility of a non-custodial wallet is often beneficial for many users. However, what is more important is that as an individual you understand what your requirements for a wallet are. If you are unable to store and save your information reliably, then a custodial wallet will be more appropriate. If you are looking for a censorship-resistant wallet, non-custodial will remain the best choice.

Picking the right wallet

When selecting which wallet you are going to use it’s important to identify which blockchain networks you want to interact with. Some wallets can be used across many different blockchains such as the popular chains Bitcoin and Ethereum. Other wallets are only compatible with a specific chain.

Polkadot ecosystem and wallets

Polkadot is a blockchain platform that provides interconnectivity and interoperability between blockchains. Polkadot’s token DOT is a significantly popular cryptocurrency. There are plenty of custodial and non-custodial wallets that are operational on the Polkadot chain. Polkadot is also the home of OAK Network.

If you are interested in OAK Network and supporting other parachains (what are parachains) you will likely need to use a non-custodial wallet with more complex functionality.

Devices and your wallet

You must also determine what device you wish to use for your wallet. There are wallets available for use via a Web application or browser extension — these are recommended for users with secure access to a personal computer. There are also wallets available for users who would prefer to use a mobile device application — available for both iOS and Android users. Alternatively, a user can purchase a hardware device to use as a secure wallet. Each option has their own set of advantages and disadvantages — and many users will often use a combination of wallets based on their needs.

Once you have an understanding about what type of wallet will suit you — it’s important to do some research of your own. This research can be done in a variety of ways:

Speak to experienced friends and colleagues
Join and interact with established communities
Find and read relevant information such as websites, blog posts and books.

Once you feel comfortable that you understand a bit about wallets — start practicing! Practice receiving and sending small transfers — purchase your first NFT. As you use your wallet your understanding of the cryptocurrency world will expand.

OAK Partner Wallets which support our Turing Network on Kusama:

Our team at OAK has partnered with a variety of great wallets for both mobile and desktop. The following partner wallets support our canary network Turing and the token TUR.

The OAK Network team is also excited to announce that community members who participated in the Turing Network crowdloan and have TUR tokens will soon be able to utilize wallet transfers. This marks an exciting milestone for our team as enabling transfers is the first key step in enabling functionality for the OAK and Turing Networks.

About OAK Network

The OAK Network is the payments and finance infrastructure for Web3, empowering connected blockchains and decentralized applications with trustless and secure automation. OAK’s event-driven execution model enables executing blockchain transaction based on time, price, or state change of another chain or smart contract. The Turing Network is OAK’s canary network, a custom Substrate parachain on the Kusama relay chain.

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