Your wallet and what you sign

Separate the wallets

Trading and holding do not belong in the same WalletWalletThe keypair that holds your funds and signs every transaction. The app is only an interface to it.. Keep a trading wallet funded with what a bad day may take, and keep everything else in a wallet that never connects to a launch site, a claim page or a new terminal.

The separation is what makes every other mistake survivable. It converts the worst realistic outcome from losing your funds into losing a float you had already decided to risk.

The words nobody may ask for

Your Seed phraseSeed phraseThe 12 or 24 words that restore a wallet on any device. restores the wallet on any device, which is the same thing as saying it is the wallet. It is typed exactly once, into the wallet app itself, and never again.

Everything below is the same request wearing different clothes. There is no legitimate version of it, and there never has been.

Always a theft, no exceptions

• A support agent offering to validate or restore your wallet
• A verification bot in a Telegram or Discord group
• A claim page that asks you to import a wallet to receive an airdrop
• A wallet migration that needs the twelve or twenty-four words

Read the signature

Most stolen funds leave through a signature the owner approved. A DrainerDrainerA site or signature request whose real purpose is to move everything out of the wallet that signs it. does not break anything: it presents a request that looks like a claim and moves the balance instead.

Modern wallets show a SimulationSimulationA dry run of a transaction that shows the expected balance changes before you sign it. of the balance changes before you sign. Read it. If a page cannot produce a readable preview, or the preview moves assets the action never mentioned, the correct response is to close the tab.

A signature you do not understand is not a formality. It is the payment.

Permissions and housekeeping

An approval or delegateApproval / revokePermission you grant a contract to spend tokens on your behalf — an allowance on EVM chains, a delegate on Solana. outlives the trade that created it. Reviewing and revoking old ones removes standing permission you granted months ago to a site you no longer use.

While you are there: ignore any Dust tokenDust tokenAn unsolicited token that appears in your wallet, usually named to look like an airdrop or a refund. that arrived on its own, and close the empty token accountsATA / rentThe associated token account each token gets in your wallet, funded by a small refundable rent deposit. left behind by dead positions. The rent comes back, which makes it the only free money in the trenches.