Would you rather have it as an app on your mobile device, on your computer, both or neither? All of those options are possible! Multi-currency vs single-currency The next important factor to consider is how you wish to access your wallet.

Later on in this guide, we will cover some of those in more detail. In fact, there are many free wallets that we recommend due to their ease of use and high security. This is not to say that there aren’t excellent free options available. In addition to excellent security, a hardware wallet stores multiple different currencies on the one device. For some, $1000 is significant for others, $50,000 is. Please note that when I say significant amount, I mean significant to you and your personal circumstances. If you plan to buy and store (hodl) a significant amount of crypto then it is highly recommended you purchase a hardware wallet.Īs you will learn below, they offer an extremely high level of security more so than online wallets. The first question to ask yourself is whether you want to pay for a wallet or not. Likewise, to keep your coins safe in your cryptocurrency wallet, you never give out the private keys (or password/passphrase) to your crypto wallets. However, when it comes to security, you would never give out your email account password to anyone. You give out your wallet address so that people can send you coins, much like how you provide your email address to your contacts to send you messages. Your public keys are like your email address, and private keys are similar to the password you use to log in to your email. Your wallet is like an email account for your cryptocurrency you share your email address but not your password.

This time let’s compare a crypto wallet with something you probably use daily, your email. To make this easier to understand, here’s another example. For anyone new to this, keep in mind that crypto wallets don’t contain any physical coins because crypto coins are digital. Remember, the blockchain is a highly secure public ledger that keeps track of all cryptocurrency transactions.

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