btc, xmr, ltc

Wallets, before the first deposit

The wallet you use for the market should not be the wallet you use for everything else. Ten minutes of setup now saves an argument with yourself a month later, when a balance is missing and the first question is "which wallet was that in".

Rules before apps

• A separate wallet for the market, not your main one. If the market wallet is drained, the rest of your coins are still where they are.
• Never an exchange. An exchange is not a wallet you hold. It is a wallet someone else holds for you, with withdrawal limits and a support queue between you and your own coins.
• The seed is written on paper and stored somewhere it is not in your phone notes. A note app on the same phone as the wallet is not storage. It is a second copy of the same failure.
• The sticky note on the laptop is not a seed phrase backup. It is a seed phrase for whoever reads the sticky note.
• A small test transfer before the first real deposit. One satoshi worth of practice, so the first deposit you make is not also the first time you have sent from this wallet.

Bitcoin

A hardware wallet or a solid mobile wallet. Not an exchange, for the reasons above. An exchange wallet shows a balance and asks for a withdrawal fee and a waiting period before the coins move. A wallet you hold shows a balance and moves the coins when you tell it to. Fresh address for every deposit. Reusing one address across deposits links them, and the market gives you a new deposit address for a reason. Use it.

Monero

Feather with its graphical interface, or the official command line wallet if you are comfortable there. The seed is a 25 word mnemonic. Two keys matter here: the view key and the spend key. The view key reads the account. The spend key moves the money. The address you deposit to is built from the view key plus a random number, which is why the same account can present many different addresses. Feather is the practical choice. Running it offline is better. Running it on a connected machine is fine, and nobody will stop you.

Litecoin

The same shape as Bitcoin, same family of apps. A reference wallet or a mobile one. Litecoin tends to show up for smaller orders, where the fees on Bitcoin would eat the point. A separate wallet for it is not required, but it is the cleaner habit, and it keeps the small orders out of the wallet that holds the rest.

Walletless pay

No wallet yet, and that is not a reason to skip the market. Walletless pay is a mode inside the market, covered on the payments page. The price in one sentence: the keys sit with the platform. You get in without a wallet, and you hold the coins without a wallet, which means the platform holds them for you in the meantime.

The test

1. Create the walletMake it, write the seed on paper, put the paper somewhere it will outlive the phone. Do not skip the paper.
2. Send a small amountFrom an old address you already control, send a small sum to the new wallet. Small enough that if the address is wrong, the lesson is cheap.
3. Send it backMove it out again, to a different address. If both directions work, the wallet is yours and the seed is real.

All three worked. Now the first deposit to the market is a deposit, not an experiment.

The payments page covers deposits and the coins in detail. The security page covers what to do when a page starts asking for the seed, which is the moment the whole setup above stops being about convenience and starts being about the coins themselves.