Glossary
What is a crypto wallet?
In one sentence
A crypto wallet does not hold your coins — it holds the keys that prove the coins are yours and let you spend them.
This is the single most common misunderstanding for newcomers. Your coins live on the blockchain, not in an app on your phone. What a wallet actually stores is a private key: a secret number that proves you control a particular address and authorises transactions from it.
That distinction has practical consequences. If your phone breaks, your coins are fine — you restore the wallet from your seed phrase on another device and the keys come back. But if you lose the seed phrase and the device, the coins are gone, because nothing anywhere else knows the key. And if someone else obtains your key, they can spend your coins immediately and irreversibly.
Wallets come in several forms. Software wallets run on a phone or computer and are convenient but connected to the internet. Hardware wallets keep the key on a dedicated offline device. Custodial wallets, such as the balance on an exchange, mean a company holds the key on your behalf — convenient, but you are trusting them.
For example
Setting up a wallet takes minutes; writing the seed phrase on paper and storing it safely is the part that actually matters.