In the field of blockchain, one of the first experiences that users typically have is with a “crypto wallet.” While cryptocurrency is one of many use cases for blockchain, it is the most popular and interesting for new participants. Even in the early days of this technology, there is already an overwhelmingly broad variety of crypto wallet providers. Their feature sets are vast, as is their approach to user experience and security.

To understand user experience (UX) is to appreciate the power and nuance behind the forces that shape human behavior. Great UX evokes a feeling of ease & delight. Designing an elegant experience requires careful thought for every moment and movement in the user’s journey.

When it comes to asset management tools such as crypto wallets, or even Venmo accounts, the bottom line is that they must provide value to the user. To understand and compare how effectively these crypto wallets perform their job, let’s look at the experience of using a crypto wallet in 6 distinct user journeys. When using a crypto wallet for the first time, you will have to:

In this article, we will explore many of today’s popular crypto wallets and discuss noteworthy differences and similarities between them. This analysis covers 18 crypto wallets, with a focus on those created primarily for securing and transacting cryptocurrency (not the more advanced, developer-focused “smart contract wallets”). Coverage includes most crypto wallet types such as desktop, web/online, mobile and hardware wallets, as well as multi- and single-currency variations therein. The purpose of this article is to serve as a visual reference of crypto wallets and to provide a comprehensive feature matrix comparing them all so that people can make informed choices about where to secure their own valuable digital assets.

tl;dr — see image below

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Before we dive into the world of crypto, let’s take a brief look at the most common means by which people typically transfer value.

First, we have good old-fashioned paper money, backed by your local government. The UX for hard cash isn’t so bad, especially at a small scale. Paper isn’t too heavy and it comes in some convenient denominations. A major UX flaw, however, is its physical form. Using cash typically means you have to leave your house and physically exchange it with another human within your preferred travel range.

The UX features of cash were then improved by bank checks. Although they are still physical in form, checks can be written in any denomination and one paper check always weighs the same, no matter how much it's worth. Again, its physical form (plus tons of forgery) produced sub-optimal results from a UX perspective. Just listen to this Planet Money podcast episode to learn about the insane process for settling checks.

This brings us to credit cards, an invention from the 1950s, which we’ve come to embrace. Now, when you want to purchase something online today, all you have to do is:

This is a lot of personally identifiable information. Not only that, the user experience is cumbersome & time consuming. Further, people continue to repeatedly endure this process of exposing some of their most valuable personal information with many merchants all over the internet. To this day, there still exists a clear opportunity to further improve the UX of money.

Attempting to influence established human behavior is often a futile effort. However, a brief look at the history of credit card adoption in the 1950s draws clear parallels to the state of cryptocurrency adoption today. Before reaching widespread adoption, credit cards faced numerous challenges including a lack of infrastructure, security vulnerabilities, an uneducated user base, fierce competition, and a lack of regulations.

So which of the credit card’s established conventions should be preserved in crypto wallets, and which need reinventing? While some crypto wallets draw heavily from familiar UX conventions, others completely reimagine asset management. However, there is a costly tradeoff between familiarity and novelty. People don’t like adapting their behaviors, but if the added value of doing so is great enough, then you can establish a new “normal.”

The single attribute that constitutes a “crypto wallet” is that it stores private keys. That’s it. (A more accurate term would be “private key custody mechanism,” but that isn’t as catchy.) Any other feature that a crypto wallet provides is simply an attempt to either make it easier to use or harder to hack.

This relationship between usability (ease of use) and security (difficulty to hack) is what defines the whole crypto wallet landscape. For the most part, usability and security are inversely related. To make something more secure, it will likely require more complex or obscure operations to access, resulting in poorer usability. Think of these two dimensions as being measured on a spectrum. The ideal crypto wallet is effortless to use and impossible to hack. However, since the ideal crypto wallet doesn’t exist, we have to settle for the reality of tradeoffs.

As the name implies, cryptocurrency is a form of currency, and there are countless ways to use and store it. You likely keep some money in a physical wallet, a bank account, under your mattress, in a PayPal / Venmo account, or in a variety of investment vehicles such as stocks or bonds. Each of these “custody mechanisms” performs a specific job. Accordingly, some are easier to use and others are more secure. Similarly, we will likely experience a future in which each person uses a variety of cryptocurrency custody mechanisms, each of which will serve a different purpose.

Until that future is realized, here’s a guide to today’s competitive landscape of crypto wallets.

The 18 crypto wallets evaluated are:

**WEB WALLETS **Coinbase (multi-currency) Portis (multi-currency) BitGo (multi-currency) MetaMask (Ethereum only) MyEtherWallet CX (Ethereum only) Dapper (Ethereum only) Bitski Beta (Ethereum only)

**DESKTOP WALLETS **Coinomi (multi-currency) Exodus (multi-currency) Jaxx (multi-currency) Electrum (Bitcoin only)

**MOBILE WALLETS **Trust Wallet (multi-currency) Coinbase Wallet (multi-currency) Enjin (multi-currency) Argent (Ethereum only) Mycelium (Bitcoin only) Spot (Bitcoin only)

**HARDWARE WALLET **Ledger Live with Nano S (multi-currency)

This user journey is critical for establishing account security. The security scheme employed here will have a significant effect on both UX and security of your crypto wallet. Just about every security scheme offers two key features to protect an account from unwanted access:

Regardless of whether you are using a web wallet, a desktop wallet, a mobile wallet or a hardware wallet, the way in which you access and protect your private keys will likely fall into one of three security scheme categories. We will examine a few examples from each of these account setup security schemes. To illustrate each scheme, the following crypto wallets will be examined:

Scheme 1: Username and password + 2-step verification

Scheme 2: Password + recovery phrase

Scheme 3: Other novel approaches

Note: For completeness, we are showing all account setup screens including those that display private recovery phrases. This will provide any reader with sufficient information to control the displayed account. These are throwaway accounts with no assets stored within them. Do not store any of your own assets within them.

This scheme is hugely popular across the wider internet. It is a very familiar scheme for the average person and has resulted in relatively wide adoption of Coinbase, making it the preferred crypto wallet for non-technical users. As the market leader in the United States, Coinbase has also earned the subjective value that comes with institutional trust. While institutional trust may not add security, it does make some people feel better when adopting new technologies. In fact, the whole banking industry is based on the idea of “Trust as a Service.”

This scheme does carry some significant security holes:

In short, you are not in total control. For some people, this is an acceptable security tradeoff for the benefit of usability. However, if you are reading this article, then you probably don’t fall into that category.

This scheme is the most prevalent across the leading crypto native wallet providers. It uses cryptography specs BIP32 and BIP39, which are generally regarded as the standard for key pair derivation among the blockchain community.

Recovery here is not associated with your e-mail or identity, but rather a seed phrase. This is a cryptographically assigned sequence of 12 or 24 words (BIP39) that is a more human-friendly version of your master key (BIP32). The output of BIP32 is effectively a randomly generated string of characters and numbers. This master key can be used to quickly create additional key pairs as well as to restore your crypto wallet on a separate device.

The seed phrase is the single point of failure/recovery for your crypto wallet and should only ever be known by you. A best practice is to store this highly confidential seed phrase in a very secure place that only you can access. Recovery at this point is your sole responsibility.

Social recovery: This is an interesting approach wherein the wallet owner can designate known and trusted individuals in their real-world network to trigger a recovery. This is similar to a multi-signature contract flow in which some designated number of parties (eg. 2 out of 3, or all) must each perform an operation (ie. authorize recovery) in order to activate the terms of the contract (ie. trigger wallet recovery).

Time-based recovery: In this approach, a wallet owner would be able to specify that if no transactions are made for a period of time (e.g. one year), then another designated account can trigger a command and recover the wallet.

After completing the one-time process of Account setup, users will land on some home screen interface. This home screen will be the main reference point in your crypto wallet life. All other user journeys will originate from this screen. Effective home screens feel like an anchor point from which the user can intuitively navigate to anywhere within their wallet. The home screen view is also the easiest way to compare the visual identity systems of all crypto wallets. Let’s glance through the home screens for all 18 crypto wallets covered in this guide. Pay attention to what kinds of information frequently appear as well as the design styles that feel most comfortable to you.

In order to receive cryptocurrency, all you need to know is the public key of the receiving wallet. Once this key is known, it must be shared with the sender, and that person will complete the process of sending funds (see User Journey 4). The receiver does not need to do anything else. As long as the sender properly sends funds, the receiving account will automatically accept the transfer. As a result of these limited requirements, the user interface (UI) for receiving crypto is pretty uniform.

The most minimal approach is to display just the public key in text form so that it can be copied and shared.

The large majority of crypto wallets go a little bit further to also provide a QR code.

Other crypto wallets go even further and provide an alternate option to buy crypto with your credit card via some exchange.

Finally, for those with heightened security preferences, the Ledger Live desktop app paired with the Ledger Nano hardware wallet can provide greater peace of mind.

This added step of verifying synchronicity between displayed addresses is a countermeasure against attack vectors such as a “man-in-the-middle” attack. This occurs when an attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties. This means that the displayed addresses on your computer screen could be manipulated without your knowledge. Given the current state of computer security, it is difficult to be certain that your computer is not compromised. A best practice for verifying that a transaction is properly received by the intended recipient is to always send a small “test” amount first.

While it is relatively easy to receive funds into a crypto wallet, sending funds introduces many more possible variables for control. And this is a good thing. When it comes to accessing and moving your valuable assets, you want to feel secure and in control. Similar to the security schemes discussed in the Account Set-up user journey, we now need to consider the tradeoffs between the opposing forces of usability and control. Let’s look at a variety of methods for sending funds, organized from beginner to advanced.

The simplest interface requires just two inputs: the recipient’s address and the amount to send. This is a similar approach to most other non-crypto peer-to-peer wallets such as Venmo.

Introducing a little more control, we now have a few configurable settings such as gas fee or transaction priority.

For those seeking total control when signing transactions, there are a few open source crypto wallets that are built by developers for developers. With these wallets, you can preview and configure just about anything such as data inputs/outputs, transaction ID, size, time to life and more.

Remember, with more control comes more responsibility. Be mindful of your own experience level and needs when deciding which crypto wallet to use for sending funds.

Upon sending funds, people want to track the status of their transaction as well as view relevant details related to it. Since the blockchain is an open and decentralized ledger, you might see a few different types of information than you would see in a typical bank statement. In addition to basic details such as date, recipient, and value of the transaction, we may also see gas fee or confirmation depth. Of course, some details are more useful than others, and most crypto wallet providers have organized these details into a hierarchy.

Most crypto wallets show account history with three levels of detail:

As the name implies, block explorers allow anyone to explore or audit all the public data recorded in every block of the entire blockchain. You can see the transaction details or the balance of any account, so long as you know the transaction ID or the account’s public key. For example, here is the first bitcoin transaction and here is the public key for Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum account.

Here are a few different ways in which some crypto wallets have designed the user experience for viewing wallet activity.

The experience of transacting on the blockchain may feel complicated and unfamiliar. Many crypto wallet providers have taken extra steps to offer settings that can be configured to accommodate the varied preferences of their diverse user base. Here are a few of the interesting settings that you might want to configure in your crypto wallet.

Bringing it all together, we have a comprehensive feature matrix to easily compare all 18 crypto wallets.

View a high-resolution version of the complete feature matrix comparing all crypto wallets here.

How people custody their assets in the future will continue to evolve. The creativity in thinking, style, and functionality of these crypto wallets demonstrate how established conventions can be challenged. When it comes to your own assets, do you want more or less control? More or less security? More or less convenience? In this world of choices and tradeoffs, no one will know which solution matches your preferences better than you. Good luck, and may this guide be your compass in navigating the crypto wallet landscape.