Things to Consider While Choosing a Crypto Wallet
When you are trading or investing in cryptocurrency for the first time, you need to decide where you will store your assets. This is where crypto wallets come in; the best crypto wallets offer more than just a storage room for your assets.
A cryptocurrency wallet acts as an ultra-secure digital wallet for your digital assets as well as a manager for them. When considering the best crypto wallet for you, you want one that lets you send and receive cryptocurrencies, among other things.
Apart from exchanging cryptocurrencies, a crypto wallet should enable trading, provide crypto news and updates, and even let you interact with smart contracts. Considering the importance of the wallet to your assets, you want to choose consciously and cautiously.
The crypto wallet should make transacting crypto as well as converting crypto to fiat, like ETH to USD, easy for you. Thus, below are vital factors you should consider when choosing a cryptocurrency wallet.
- Security
The security of the cryptocurrency wallet is one of the first things to consider when choosing a crypto wallet. You want to ensure the wallet app has a first line of defense should your device fall into the wrong hands. To put it bluntly, your crypto wallet should require some sort of identification to unlock it, including a PIN.
However, PIN can be inconvenient, particularly if you plan on using the wallet regularly. If you want extra and easier security, you can choose a wallet that integrates fingerprint or facial recognition for unlocking.
- Trustworthiness
The myriads of features a crypto wallet has are not important if it isn’t trustworthy, which typically amounts to transparency. It is very possible that a crypto wallet has built-in security flaws that it doesn’t want its customers to know about.
These flaws (by design or accident) wouldn’t have mattered, but they will most likely put your assets at risk. Thus, research on the wallet, checking reviews of past and current users, to ascertain its trustworthiness.
You can check out cryptocurrency forums and reviews of users to see what people are saying about the wallet. Platforms where you can check reviews include the App Store, Trust Pilot, and even Google Play.
- Level of Control
Standard cryptocurrency wallets should give you exclusive control over your digital assets by giving you access to private keys. You want to ensure the crypto wallet provides you access to your private keys, giving you control over your assets.
Each crypto address has its private key, also known as a passphrase; the passphrase works exactly like the key to your house. That is, only the person in possession of this private key has complete control over the digital assets associated with it.
Plus, not having access to your private keys means your assets are walking on thin ice. In other words, all you have on them is a claim; because someone else controls them, they can disappear at any time.
Apart from that, when you don’t have your private key, you need to take permission every time you need to trade crypto. The issue here is that if the custodian of the keys doesn’t charge additional fees, they will delay sending your request.
- Easy Fee Customization
The best crypto wallet ensures you can customize the fees paid to public blockchain miners or validators easily. You want to look for a crypto wallet featuring convenient presets like slow, medium, and fast for buying cryptocurrency.
The transaction fee you pay for each preset varies, with the “fast” option being the highest. However, a higher transaction fee also means faster transaction time, meaning your transaction is done in less time.
Moreover, it is always to have a say on how you want to pay for each crypto transaction. For instance, you can choose the exact gas price for ETH transactions and byte rate for Bitcoin transactions.
- Private Key Management
We recommend using a crypto wallet that has backup features; these are especially important when you hold different cryptocurrencies. Consider a wallet that offers cloud backup, for example, for your private keys.
This feature lets you save all your private keys in the cloud where they are unlikely to get stolen or lost. Plus, every time you open a new wallet, your private keys are immediately and automatically backed up to the cloud.
The beauty of this feature is that if you lose your device, you won’t lose your assets. You only need to reinstall the app on your new device, sign in, enter your cloud backup password, and you’ll get your keys back.
This feature provides a better alternative to writing your private keys down on paper, which can get lost. The cryptocurrency market is replete with great crypto wallets with cool and advantageous features like this.
Conclusion
If you were only working with blockchain technology, you wouldn’t need a guide on choosing a crypto wallet. However, because there are third parties involved, doing thorough research is critical before you start your crypto investing or trading journey.
These features highlighted in this article are the major and most important factors to consider in a crypto wallet. The goal is to have a wallet that makes trading or investing crypto easier while ensuring your digital assets are kept secure.
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