Purpose of Ethereum Wallets

An Ethereum wallet is a piece of software that helps users to manage their Ether and interact with smart contracts. Therefore, it provides a graphical user interface where it shows the Ether balance of your account. Some wallets also provide a user interface for seeing the balance of tokens and even interact with them.

In the background, the wallet holds the private keys of the user. With these keys, it signs transactions. To send transactions and receive information about the blockchain, the wallet is connected to a full node.

Wallets come in many forms and shapes. Some are an app, some are browser extensions, while others are web-wallets. There are also hardware wallets. It is important to remember that wallets only contain private keys. They don’t contain tokens. Everything that a wallet displays, is stored in the blockchain. The wallet is only a convenient way to look the relevant information up and sign transactions.