Chapter 5. Wallets
The word “wallet” is used to describe a few different things in Ethereum.
At a high level, a wallet is a software application that serves as the primary user interface to Ethereum. The wallet controls access to a user’s money, managing keys and addresses, tracking the balance, and creating and signing transactions. In addition, some Ethereum wallets can also interact with contracts, such as ERC20 tokens.
More narrowly, from a programmer’s perspective, the word wallet refers to the system used to store and manage a user’s keys. Every wallet has a key-management component. For some wallets, that’s all there is. Other wallets are part of a much broader category, that of browsers, which are interfaces to Ethereum-based decentralized applications, or DApps, which we will examine in more detail in Chapter 12. There are no clear lines of distinction between the various categories that are conflated under the term wallet.
In this chapter we will look at wallets as containers for private keys, and as systems for managing these keys.
Wallet Technology Overview
In this section we summarize the various technologies used to construct user-friendly, secure, and flexible Ethereum wallets.
One key consideration in designing wallets is balancing convenience and privacy. The most convenient Ethereum wallet is one with a single private key and address that you reuse for everything. Unfortunately, such a solution is a privacy nightmare, as anyone can easily track and correlate ...
Get Mastering Ethereum now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
