Don’t look for a digital wallet in your pants pocket or purse. The wallet we’re talking about here is what you’ll need to financially transact in the blockchain world, manage your collection of cryptocurrencies, store your NFT tokens, and interact with decentralized apps. Your wallet and its contents are secured by a “private key” (password), a wholly-unique-to-you recovery phrase or series of words that allow just you and you alone to access your wallet.  Should you wish to transact to/from your wallet, you’ll also have a “public key” that serves as its digital address that allows you to send currency or stored assets to someone else, and vice versa.

Wallets come in two flavors: “hot” and “cold”. Hot wallets are stored online which provides ease and immediacy in using them, but as with anything online, security vulnerabilities may occur that could pose severe, perhaps catastrophic risk to your wallet’s holdings. Cold wallets also use private and public keys, but these wallets are kept offline, say, on paper or in a secondary drive designed for that purpose, and thus cannot be exposed to online vulnerability (but cold wallets are still vulnerable should you allow a bad actor to learn your private key).

 There’s no Velcro strip or dainty zipper securing your digital wallet; it’s your private key alone that keep its contents safe…as long as you NEVER share your private key with anyone!