Getting started
What is a decentralized wallet?
A decentralized wallet - more precisely a self-custody wallet - is one where the private key belongs to you and no company sits between you and the network. Nobody can freeze it, nobody can reverse a transaction, and nobody can recover it for you. Those are the same property stated as a benefit and as a cost.
What you gain
- No counterparty. There is no company whose failure takes your balance with it, historically the largest single cause of lost crypto.
- No permission. No withdrawal queue, no account review, no freeze.
- Direct settlement. Transactions confirm in seconds and the tokens are yours immediately.
What you take on
- Finality. A mistaken transaction, a wrong address or a signed approval cannot be undone by anyone.
- Recovery. If a recovery phrase exists and you lose it, the funds are unreachable permanently.
- Judgement. Every safety decision that a custodian would make for you is now yours.
The middle ground
Embedded wallets split the key so that no single party can reconstruct it, and tie access to your login instead of to a phrase you must store. You keep the ability to sign directly and lose the failure mode where a piece of paper ends the account. This is what FOMOSCAN's Main Wallet is: it signs in your browser, and the terminal never holds the key.
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