Remember in the early and mid 90s when access to the internet took a while, made awful noises, and overall was a tad janky? Well, we are sort of in that space all over again in the age of blockchain. Accessing the blockchain and any way of creating, trading, or selling NFTs requires a crypto wallet, and I’m here to tell you it may take a few minutes — which adds to the suspense — but you will get the hang of it.

Now, it isn’t an actual wallet, but rather, your *bank account* so to speak. It lives on your browser, and gives you access to your assets and web3 websites that you want to interact with. I don’t recommend anyone doing any of this on their phone.

Now, you can get what is known as a cold wallet which is this fun thing. It’s an option if you have a lot of crypto or tokens and you don’t want to be hacked. As hot wallets connect to the Internet (browsers), they’re considered less safe compared to cold wallets that are always offline. However, hot wallets are still safer than storing crypto on centralized exchanges.

There are two wallets I use: MetaMask and Kukai. MetaMask is king, and Kukai is the duke, kind of. They each access a different blockchain (Etheruem/Polygon and Tezos). For the sake of playing around I recommend the Tezos blockchain and Kukai wallet if you are a total newbie. They are easy, you can sync with Google, and it is dirt cheap!

These crypto wallets provide self-custody, which means users can hold crypto in a way where they have access only to the assets. Every time you log in or make a transaction, it will go through your crypto wallet. No one can access it, aside to put money in! They cannot take money out unless you give them your “seed phrase” and DON’T EVER DO THAT! I did it once because someone pretended to be from OpenSea, and mirrored a whole help desk website. Do not ever give your logins out and do not store them on your computer — write them down.

Your wallet is where you can see your assets, whatever those may be.

This is unlike storing coins in accounts on centralized exchanges like Coinbase, Binance.US etc, where the exchange is holding their user’s assets. But, for the purposes of collecting NFTs, we don’t need to get ahead of ourselves and worry about exchanges, investing, staking etc.

Crypto wallets are very handy for charities, and for anyone who wants to send money to a relative whose country has been attacked, like Ukraine.

You can share your crypto address with anyone! I even made mine into vendettabella.eth to make things simple instead of the long numeric address. Speaking of which, always copy/paste addresses. Never type them manually, because one typo, and that NFT or crypto will go to another person’s wallet. Why would you provide your wallet address to the world? Well, presents! Airdrops, contests, and charity are all reasons.

More reading on airdrops.

More reading on wallets etc.