Why Do I Need a Crypto Wallet?
As I’ve been talking to people, I’m surprised by how many people are leaving their coins on exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, etc. I’m going to share with you some reasons why you might want to consider downloading a crypto wallet or purchasing a physical one.
Not Your Keys, Not Your Crypto
You literally don’t own the crypto while it’s on the exchange (not your keys not your crypto). An exchange can get hacked or set a withdrawal limit so you can only access so much of YOUR OWN CRYPTO. Also, if there are any technical issues with an exchange, YOUR CRYPTO is locked there. Here is a great article on it.
I’ve actually been through many variations of this myself before I learned my lesson. I had funds on Cryptopia that just disappeared when the exchange went out of business, and it’s still been a hassle trying to get it back. I think I had WAX and Doge Coin on there, but I’m not sure because I can’t check now! I’ve had a time last week where I wanted to send some Cardano I had somewhere on Coinbase, but sending and receiving was halted when I wanted to do it. Awww hell nah.
Getting Coins Early
Besides all that…many of the super gains are from the coins that aren’t on big exchanges yet. Lots of times, once they hit the main exchanges the coin will do a severe run up in price. I remember the days of a coin hitting Coinbase and the price of that coin going 10X because Coinbase just wasn’t accepting that many coins at the time. If you can, you want to buy good coins on DEX’s (Decentralized Exchanges) like Uniswap, Quickswap, Pancake Swap BEFORE they hit the main exchanges.
Airdrops
I’ve had many airdrops and my friends have had airdrops too. An airdrop is a distribution of a reserve of tokens, usually to users who have completed certain actions or fulfill certain criterias. Basically, free tokens for doing small tasks and/or holding the coing on a wallet. SOMETIMES projects give airdrops on exchanges, but almost always they airdrop to wallets. Uniswap literally airdropped 400 of their coins to wallets, and that influenced so many other projects to start airdropping their tokens.
These are the major reasons to have a crypto wallet.
Online wallets are so easy to set up
The wallet I use the most is Metamask, and all you have to do is download the app or the browser extension > copy your secret phrase down somewhere safe and viola! – You’ve got a wallet. It takes maybe 5-10 minutes. When you have that simple wallet, you can use the DEX’s and go to OpenSea and other NFT exchanges and interact with so many other good projects and dapps. Wallets for the damn win!
