Lesson 06 · Unit 1 · General
Keys, wallets and the one mistake
Everything so far has been about the token. This one is about you. A wallet is not an account with a company behind it: there is no password reset, no support desk, no reversal. One string of words is the wallet, and whoever reads it owns everything in it, from anywhere, forever.
That sounds like it makes custody hard. It does the opposite: it means there is exactly one thing to protect, and a short list of ways people lose it. Almost nobody is hacked. They are asked — by a support agent who is not one, by a site that wants the phrase “to validate”, by a transaction they signed without reading. The next two chapters take each of those apart. This is the short version, and it is enough to keep you safe today.
Do
Keep the seed phrase offline, on paper, in one place
Use a separate wallet for anything experimental
Read what a transaction is asking for before signing
Don't
Type the seed phrase into any website, ever
Grant an unknown program delegate rights over one of your balances
Store the phrase in a screenshot or a password note
SEED
Say it to no one
Everything else is recoverable
Every approval is a permission
Different wallet for degen plays
Where this goes next
The whole custody chapter comes next — what a seed phrase really is, and what you agree to every time you approve a transaction.