I saw hot wallet and the obvious first thing that came to mind was a wallet that is obviously hot, then you need to see my reaction when I saw cold storage, I wondered who named these wallets and why did they choose to give them hot and cold? But I need to take my crypto lessons seriously, so I read about hot wallets and their differences from cold wallet, and I understood the reason they chose the name hot and cold wallet. Hot wallet is a wallet that you can use online, its always online, its connected to the internet, while the cold wallet is like a flash drive, its a physical wallet that is not always connected to the internet. So in a nutshell, hot wallet is a digital wallet while cold wallet is a physical crypto wallet. This was so exciting to learn today, having A HIVE wallet means I have a hot wallet right? Or am I mixing this?
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I currently use metamask, did my first few transactions on metamask the other day to experience what DeFi feels like, which was a very good experience by the way, wrote about it in some of my posts. I chose metamask because that was the wallet my friend recommended. Then I did other researches and realised that there are about more than five other hot wallets out there. We have the metamask wallet, which is quite okay, but unfortunately I prefer using it on my laptop than on my mobile phone. Using it as extension gives me a swift experience compared to when I use it on my mobile phone. While I use the metamask wallet, I found the Coinbase wallet, its another dex wallet, I downloaded the app, created a new wallet not knowing that my metamask private keys could also work on my Coinbase wallet. They are all the same as long as they are EVM wallets. Still haven’t figured what that means but I will research about that later.
Another hot wallet that people use is trust wallet, I haven’t used it, but I download it, since its an EVM wallet like the rest, I was able to use my metamask private keys to import my wallet into my trust wallet. Blockchain wallet is another hot wallet that is being used by people, haven’t used that so I don’t know how swift it is, but I will take a look to have the experience. Bitkeep is another wallet, I also downloaded the wallet on my mobile phone, used it, seemed great, but I wouldn’t use it on my laptop as an extension. Hot wallet are at risk to hacking because of their internet access. Its easy for hackers to hack them, that is the major disadvantage of hot wallets. But cold storage, the hacker will have to be there with the wallet physically to hack it.