Choosing a wallet: a beginner's guide

Your wallet is where your crypto lives. Or more accurately, where the keys to your crypto live — the coins themselves are on the blockchain. The wallet just holds the credentials needed to move them.

This sounds like a small distinction. It is the most important distinction in this entire industry.

Hot wallets

A "hot" wallet is software running on a device connected to the internet — your phone, your laptop, a browser extension. Examples: MetaMask, Phantom, Trust Wallet, Rabby, Backpack. All of them work with WEGO.

Hot wallets are convenient. You can open them in two seconds, sign a transaction, get back to your day. They're great for small balances and frequent transactions: tipping a friend, paying for a coffee, swapping a small amount, signing into a dApp.

The downside: anything connected to the internet has attack surface. Phishing sites, malicious browser extensions, fake support agents, compromised computers. People lose hot wallet balances every day.

Cold wallets

A "cold" wallet is a hardware device that stores keys offline. The two most common are Ledger (Nano S Plus or Nano X) and Trezor (Model One or Model T). They cost roughly $80 to $200.

Hardware wallets dramatically reduce attack surface. Even a fully compromised computer cannot extract a key from a hardware device — the signing happens inside the device, and only the signed transaction (not the key) leaves it. To steal funds, an attacker would need physical access to the device and your PIN.

The downside: less convenient. You have to plug it in to sign transactions. You have to be careful with the seed phrase (the recovery words that let you restore the wallet if the device is lost or destroyed).

A pragmatic setup

A pragmatic setup for most people:

• Hot wallet: Phantom for Solana, MetaMask for Ethereum, etc. Hold maybe $100 to $1,000. Use it for daily transactions and small swaps.
• Cold wallet: Ledger or Trezor. Hold the rest. Move funds from hot to cold when the hot balance gets uncomfortable.

When you do a big swap on WEGO, you can send the destination to your cold wallet's address — no need to bridge through the hot wallet at all.

Mobile vs desktop

Mobile wallets (Phantom mobile, Trust Wallet, etc.) are usually safer than browser-extension wallets because mobile OSes have better sandboxing. The downside is that interacting with dApps on mobile is sometimes clunky. For desktop, Rabby is a notable improvement over MetaMask in terms of transaction preview and phishing protection.

Custodial wallets are not wallets

A note: services like Coinbase Wallet (the standalone app, not Coinbase the exchange) and trust-yet-verify "wallets" inside centralized exchanges are technically custodial. If the company freezes your account, you don't have the keys. They're convenient, but they're not self-custody.

When you set up a real wallet, the test is simple: does the wallet show you a seed phrase that only you see? If yes, it's self-custody. If no, you don't control the keys.

What WEGO needs from your wallet

WEGO doesn't connect to your wallet at all. We don't ask you to sign messages. We don't need permission to anything. You paste a destination address, send a deposit from your wallet to the address WEGO shows you, and the funds arrive in the destination wallet. Three independent transactions. No connection between WEGO and the wallet software itself.

This is on purpose. The fewer permissions a service asks for, the harder it is for that service to ever betray you.