Summary
- Wallets store your secret key and allow users to sign transactions
- Hardware wallets store your secret key on a separate device
- Software wallets use your computer for secure storage. On desktops, software wallets are often browser extensions that add the ability to connect to a wallet from a website. On mobile, wallet apps have their own browsers.
- Solana's Wallet Adapter allows you to build websites that can request a user's wallet address and propose transactions for them to sign
Lesson
Wallets
In the previous two lessons, we discussed keypairs. Keypairs are used to locate accounts and sign transactions. While the public key of a keypair is perfectly safe to share, the secret key should always be kept in a secure location. If a user's secret key is exposed, then a malicious actor could execute transactions with the authority of that user, allowing them to transfer all the assets inside.
A “wallet” refers to anything that stores a secret key to keep it secure. These secure storage options can generally be described as either “hardware” or “software” wallets. Hardware wallets are storage devices that are separate from your computer. Software wallets are applications you can install on your existing device(s).
- On mobile, software wallets are typically mobile apps, installed through the iOS App Store or Google Play. These include their own web browsers.
- On desktop, software wallets often come in the form of a browser extension.
Both techniques allow websites to interact easily with the wallet, for example:
- Seeing the wallet's wallet address (their public key)
- Submitting transactions for a user's approval to sign
- Sending signed transactions to the network
Signing transactions requires using your secret key. By letting a site submit a transaction to your wallet and having the wallet handle the signing, you ensure that you never expose your secret key to the website. Instead, you only share the secret key with the wallet application.
Unless you're creating a wallet application yourself, your code should never need to ask a user for their secret key. Instead, you can ask users to connect to your site using a reputable wallet.
Solana's Wallet Adapter
If you build web apps, and need users to be able to connect to their wallets and sign transactions through your apps, you'll want Solana's Wallet Adapter. Wallet Adapter is a suite of modular packages:
- The core functionality is found in
@solana/wallet-adapter-base. - React support is added by
@solana/wallet-adapter-react. - Additional packages provide components for common UI frameworks. In this
lesson, and throughout this course, we'll be using components from
@solana/wallet-adapter-react-ui.
Finally, some packages are adapters for specific wallet apps. These are now no longer necessary in most cases - see below.
Install Wallet-Adapter Libraries for React
When adding wallet support to an existing React app, you start by installing the
appropriate packages. You'll need @solana/wallet-adapter-base,
@solana/wallet-adapter-react. If you plan to use the provided React
components, you'll also need to add @solana/wallet-adapter-react-ui.
All wallets that support the Wallet Standard are supported out of the box, and all the popular Solana wallets support the Wallet Standard. However, if you wish to add support for any wallets that don't support the standard, add a package for them.