Web3 Onboarding Tutorials

Starting a self-custody wallet

• Metamask is a digital wallet for storing your own funds like your own safe rather than in a centralized wallet like Coinbase, Kraken, or Kucoin, which are more akin to a bank. A tutorial for creating a Metamask wallet can be found here. This is the Metamask official site: Metamask.io. It's very important not to copy/paste, take pictures or screenshots, or save your private seed phrase or private key. Write it down and save it securely like a bar of gold. It is your password/key/access to your funds and no one else can retrieve them once this is lost.

  • If you would like to set up a LBRY/Odysee account (where that tutorial was created), click here. You can earn crypto for watching, creating, and posting videos and other content.

• Your wallet will start off with some built-in networks (in web3, networks are the same as blockchains, just another term.) like Ethereum mainnet and a few testnets used for testing stuff out without worrying about losing funds. Ethereum mainnet can get quite expensive in terms of gas fees to do tranactions on this blockchain. (Gas fees are what we have to pay minors to do any kind of transactions. Minors use their computers or specialized, dedicated hardware to do all the computations needed to make these transactions happen on the blockchain.)
  To solve the issue of high gas fees, quicker transaction times, and a few other reasons, many other blockchains have sprouted up called Layer 2 Networks/Blockchains, or L2s. One popular layer 2 solution is called Polygon. We will add this L2 network to our Metamask wallet so we can use it. There are a few ways to add your own Custom RPC Network but we are going to use an easy shortcut.

• Navigate in your browser to Quickswap and click on the Switch to Matic button at the top right hand corner of the screen.

  
  Polygon used to be called MATIC and that is still the name of their native token, which is used to pay for gas fees on this network.

• When you click on this button you will get a popup notification asking to add the polygon network to your wallet. Click Approve.

  

• It will then prompt you to allow this site to switch to this new network. Click Approve again.
  

  

• Next it will prompt you to connect to this site. Click Next.
  

  

• The final prompt will be to allow this site to see your public address and ask you to sign things (like when you want to make an exchange, it would ask approval when you try to swap a token). Click Connect
  

  
  Good job! You've created your own wallet and added a new network called Polygon. Remember to store that passphrase you wrote down in a location that's secure from theft and the elements.
  We will talk about the many things we can do with our new wallets in our next meeting. Happy trails Sages.
  
  

tags: sage onboarding wallet ethereum polygon