[Q&A] Which ethereum wallet to use?

Need to store your ethers and interact with some interesting dapps? Yes you need a wallet! But which one to choose?

Rather than giving you a specific list of services/softwares to use I’ll give you a broad categorization of each wallet type, so you can then due your own due diligence and choose what’s best for your use case.

Running a Full Node

Running a full node such as Parity or Geth, gives you full privacy and control over your funds because you interact directly with the ethereum network without the need of any intermediary.

Why? Because you are synchronizing the whole ethereum blockchain locally, so that you can validate transactions yourself and broadcast transactions directly to the network.

Seems amazing but what’s the catch? Well you need a powerful computer with serious resources! Lots of RAM and a big SSD hard drive are highly suggested since the blockchain is pretty big and grows each day.

Make sure you are able to use the command line and that you carefully read the documentation, so that you know where your keypairs are and how to use all the functions.

Using a third-party wallet

Here you are basically using “light nodes”, which allow you to interact with a remote full node on another computer somewhere on the internet, saving you the hassle to do command-line fu and filling up your hard drive.

If you read the last part carefully you probably already guessed the drawback of this… The fact that you are using an intermediate step before interacting with the ethereum blockchain. Which can be a privacy issue for some users.

There are many types of third-party wallets:

• Native applications both for desktop and mobile platforms
• Web based wallets, which run completely in the browser
• Browser extensions
• Hardware wallets

The only wallet I want to mention is MetaMask, because I use it myself and because it offers a super easy way to interact with dapps and some exchanges. Also lets you switch super fast between the real ethereum mainnet and the various test networks such as Ropsten.

So I hope I gave you a clear and concise answer, think about what your needs are and then do a bit of due diligence on what the most adopted wallets are, usually the more a piece of software is used, the more it is maintained and scrutinized.

Also PLEASE do not keep all of your funds in one wallet but in at least three or four, this way if something bad happens (exit scam, hack, loss of private key) you will not lose everything. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket.

What do you think about the currently available ethereum wallets? Which one do you use? Leave a comment!