Crypto wallet
A program or device that stores the access keys to digital coins rather than the coins themselves: the coin records sit in the network's ledger, and the wallet only proves the right to dispose of them.
A crypto wallet is a program, a device or a set of records that stores the cryptographic keys giving the right to dispose of digital coins. There are no coins inside the wallet itself: balances and transfers are recorded in the distributed ledger, and the wallet can only display the records that relate to your addresses and sign a new transaction. Losing a wallet without a backup means losing access to a record that continues to exist on the network but no longer answers to anyone.
How access works
At the core is a pair of keys. The public one is turned into an address that can be freely shared with whoever is paying you. The secret one is the private key, and a signature made with it proves to the network that it is the owner of the address who is giving the instruction. Most modern wallets do not store keys one by one but derive them from a single original sequence of words: with it, the wallet is restored in full on a new device, which is why this phrase is equivalent to all of the funds at once.
Beyond that, wallets differ in where the secret is kept. In a "hot" wallet it sits on a device with a permanent internet connection — convenient for frequent transactions, vulnerable to malicious code. In a "cold" wallet the key never leaves an offline medium and signs a transaction without revealing itself. A separate case is an account on a crypto exchange: there the keys are held by the service, and the client is left with a claim against it, similar in nature to an entry at a depository, only without a comparable legal regime.
An example using the platform's data
The platform maintains a ranking of the largest digital coins by market capitalisation:
| # | Security | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BTCBitcoin | 1,662.00 bn USD |
| 2 | ETHEthereum | 304.86 bn USD |
| 3 | USDTTether | 184.11 bn USD |
As of trading date: 10/10/2026
Any of these coins looks the same in a wallet: an address and the ledger records tied to it. That is why a "wallet balance" is not the contents of the program but the result of its query to the network; reinstall the wallet with the same seed phrase and you will see the same balances.
What a wallet is not
A wallet does not make an asset a recognised instrument. A digital currency under Russian law is not property held in a brokerage account, and having technical access does not amount to permission for any transaction: the annual limit on purchases of digital currency by a non-qualified investor through a single intermediary is RUB 300,000. The second common confusion is to treat the wallet as a vault. It stores the right to sign, not the value: if the device is hacked, the network will not tell someone else's signature from yours and will not reverse the transfer, because it has no authority that enforces claims.