Wallet
- Software that holds all your (bitcoin) addresses and secret keys. Use it to send, receive, and store your coins.
- The following information comes from this post by Consensys (5-9-2019):
"A blockchain wallet contains the public key for others to transfer cryptocurrency to your address and the private key so you can securely access your own digital assets. A blockchain wallet usually accompanies node hosting and stores cryptocurrencies on your computer. The safest place for storing digital assets is offline, what is often called “cold storage.” Read “7 Pro Tips for Keeping Your Crypto Safe” for some best practices on protecting your digital assets."
- From a blog by Vitalik (6-2023):
"Smart contract wallets add more complexity, by making it much more difficult to have the same address across L1 and the various L2s. Today, most users are using externally owned accounts, whose address is literally a hash of the public key that is used to verify signatures - so nothing changes between L1 and L2. With smart contract wallets, however, keeping one address becomes more difficult. Although a lot of work has been done to try to make addresses be hashes of code that can be equivalent across networks, most notably CREATE2 and the ERC-2470 singleton factory, it's difficult to make this work perfectly. Some L2s (eg. "type 4 ZK-EVMs") are not quite EVM equivalent, often using Solidity or an intermediate assembly instead, preventing hash equivalence. And even when you can have hash equivalence, the possibility of wallets changing ownership through key changes creates other unintuitive consequences."
There are many different kinds of wallets:
