Wallet

A wallet is a piece of software that lets a user store their private cryptographic keys and interact with a blockchain: send and receive cryptocurrencies, sign transactions, connect to DeFi dApps.

There are two main families: hot wallets (connected software, like MetaMask, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet) and cold wallets (offline hardware, like Ledger or Trezor) that offer far stronger security for larger holdings. Smart wallets (account abstraction, ERC-4337) make it possible to encode complex rules: social recovery, multisig, gas paid by a third party.

In practice, the wallet is the user's on-chain identity - losing your seed phrase means losing access to your assets.