Top Five Crypto Wallets

In this blog, I’m going to share my top five crypto wallets, including the wallet that I think is the single best wallet hands down out there, head and shoulders above the rest, and it’s not Metamask. I’m also going to share my top hardware wallet picks as well. If you’re not using a hardware wallet, you’re massively putting your assets and your money at risk, especially if you have more than $1,000 in crypto invested.

What is a Crypto Wallet?

Really briefly, what is a crypto wallet? Most people genuinely don’t understand how crypto wallets actually work, but it’s super important. Lots of people think that crypto wallets are like an exchange account, where they can just use their password and email to log into their wallet and get access to it from any device they own. Wallets, however, are self-custodial; they are not just some account that you can log into.

If you have your crypto wallet on your phone and you don’t have your backup seed saved somewhere, and you lose your phone or your phone dies for some reason, you would lose access to 100% of your funds stored on your crypto wallet on your phone. There would be no way to recover those funds. You cannot just call up Metamask or your wallet provider and say, “I lost access to my funds; here’s my email; can I recover them?” That doesn’t work. There is no way on earth to recover those funds, period. That’s a pretty important detail that far too many people do not understand.

How Crypto Wallets Work

Your wallet is like your personal signature. It identifies you as the entity that controls the address that holds your crypto assets. Contrary to popular belief, your crypto wallet doesn’t actually hold any crypto inside of it. There are no bytes of code that represent your individual cryptos or NFTs stored directly on your computer or phone. Instead, tokens and NFTs are always stored on-chain; they’re always on the blockchain. Your wallet is just a way to identify you as the person who controls those assets on the blockchain.

If you lose your device, you lose your phone, or your desktop computer catches fire, and you have your seed phrase written down and stored somewhere safe, you can take those 12 or 24 words in your seed phrase, input them into a new wallet on a new device, and it’ll load your wallet on that new device. All your assets will still be there. This means if you were to memorize your seed phrase, you could technically carry your entire crypto net worth in your head.

Top Five Favorite Crypto Wallets

1. Metamask

Metamask is the most widely used crypto wallet out there. It has both a browser extension and a mobile wallet app. I personally use the Metamask browser extension. I’ve used Metamask for years; it has been my go-to crypto wallet for a long time. There are things I enjoy about it, but my biggest complaint is that despite being the largest wallet on the planet, it feels like they have done very little in terms of innovation and making the wallet more useful and secure for the average person.

Most crypto exploits for the average person are because they sign some sort of malicious transaction. If these transactions were in human-readable terms, no person in their right mind would approve them. Metamask doesn’t bother to do that or have any sort of warnings or security features baked into the wallet, which to me is lazy. These features should have been added a long time ago.

Recently, they introduced something called Metamask Snaps, which allows anyone to build plugins for the Metamask wallet. These can provide different features and useful things that Metamask themselves haven’t built into the wallet. Think of it like Chrome plugins that augment the browser. There are quite a few different Metamask Snaps that add various safety features to the wallet. However, the average person who’s new to crypto probably doesn’t know Metamask Snaps exist.

Some features of Metamask:

• Buy crypto directly from the wallet using a credit card
• Swap crypto directly from the wallet
• Bridge funds using the wallet
• View NFTs in the wallet
• Load a webpage showing all assets on that address across various networks

Overall, Metamask is the OG default wallet that most people end up using. It does the job, but there are much better wallets out there.

2. Coinbase Wallet

Coinbase Wallet is the self-custody wallet, not to be confused with the Coinbase exchange. The wallet has a sleek design and is easy to set up. It’s meant to be the perfect companion for users of the Coinbase exchange, linking up with your Coinbase account. It allows you to link your Coinbase account directly to the wallet and transfer funds easily.

Features:

• Buy crypto via the wallet
• Swap crypto via the wallet
• Bridge via the wallet
• View NFTs in the wallet
• Matic and ETH staking built in
• Explore section for browsing top movers and building a watch list
• Community tab for following other wallet addresses
• Simulates how assets will change based on the transaction

My number one complaint is that you can’t currently use a hardware wallet with it outside of a Ledger wallet. Despite this, Coinbase Wallet is a decent pick for a wallet.

3. Rainbow Wallet

Rainbow Wallet is a beautifully designed and simple wallet. It connects with both Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets. It makes it easy to onboard crypto via Coinbase and has all the main features like swapping, buying crypto, and viewing NFTs. It doesn’t have a bridging function, but I’ve never used the built-in bridging function myself. Transactions are somewhat easier to read than Metamask but not as useful as Coinbase Wallet.

4. Phantom

Phantom is well-known in the Solana ecosystem and recently branched out to the ETH ecosystem. Branding-wise, Phantom, Coinbase Wallet, and Rainbow are head and shoulders above the rest. Phantom has all the main features like swapping, viewing NFTs, and buying crypto with a credit card. It has a simple wallet interface but only allows the use of a Ledger hardware wallet. There is no built-in bridging function.

5. Rabby Wallet+

Rabby Wallet, recommended by Scott from the Obsidian Council, quickly became my number one go-to wallet. It shows your entire portfolio automatically built into the wallet, including staked and yield farming assets. Unlike Metamask, Rabby shows all assets you hold on that address across every chain. It switches chains intuitively and makes the user experience significantly better.

Features:

• Built-in swap feature that aggregates prices from multiple sources
• Simulates gas cost and shows the dollar amount in USD
• Enables specific aggregators for safety
• Built-in widget showing current gas fees
• Approvals button to check and revoke approvals
• Instant gas topup feature for any chain
• Detailed transaction information with security warnings

Rabby makes it far less likely to get exploited and lose funds, requiring multiple security warnings to be overridden.

Conclusion

In conclusion, these are my top five crypto wallets, with Rabby Wallet being my favorite due to its advanced features and user experience. Make sure to use a hardware wallet to protect your assets, especially if you have more than $1,000 in crypto invested. Understanding how crypto wallets work and choosing the right one for your needs can help keep your assets safe.