Find Your Wallet Type

Wallets store and manage your crypto. Some are custodial, where an exchange manages your crypto on your behalf. Others are self-custodial, where you’re in control.

If you choose a self-custodial wallet, you’ll get an address and a private key  — a secret, alphanumeric code that allows you to access and manage your crypto funds. Private keys are stored in your wallet and used to securely approve transactions when you send or trade crypto. Your wallet can create new addresses and private keys over time for added privacy, but they're all safely managed within the same wallet.

If you’re signed up to a centralized exchange, you will have a custodial wallet. This means they control the private keys that let you access your crypto. They also take care of backups, resets, and fraud checks.

Self-custodial wallets put you in charge of keys and recovery. It’s less convenient than a custodial wallet because you manage security and backups yourself, but you have more control over your crypto.

“Hot” and “cold” describe how a wallet is stored and used. Hot wallets live on devices connected to the internet (e.g. phone/laptop) and are handy for daily use. Cold wallets are offline only (e.g. hardware/paper) — they’re safer and good for long-term holders.

You can mix custody and temperature, like having a self-custodial cold wallet. In a later simulation we’ll walk you through how to set up a self-custodial hot wallet.

Wallets can have multiple addresses, and each one is unique. Even if computers ran for a billion years, the chance of them generating the same one twice is effectively zero. When sending or receiving crypto, it’s vital to always double and triple-check wallet addresses as even a single wrong digit means the funds won’t come through to you.

Because wallet addresses are long and difficult to memorize, scammers make fake addresses with the same first and last four characters that resemble ones you trust. 

This is called address poisoning. Always check the middle four characters along with the first and last of any address you want to send to or receive from.

If you receive funds from a scam address, they’re often fake tokens designed to resemble ones you often interact with. The risk is in what happens after: attackers poison your history so that next time you send, you might copy the wrong address from your past transactions. To avoid this, always copy directly from the address source.