To interact with the Credix platform, you will need a wallet. A wallet makes it easy for you to keep track of your funds and to interact with programs on the Solana blockchain. You can think of a wallet as your old-school banking application; once you're logged in, you can see your funds, transfer them, invest, etc. A wallet takes care of your public / private key-pair and signs for transactions on your behalf (after you approve them). It abstracts away all the cryptography needed to produce valid signatures.
For this tutorial, we will make use of Phantom, a Solana wallet trusted by over 1M users worldwide. Important to note is that Phantom is a non-custodial wallet; meaning that the Phantom team doesn't store your key-pair and thus never has access to your funds. This also means that you need to take care of having a back-up of your key-pair in case you don't have access to your computer anymore. A popular way of backing up your keys is a hardware wallet.
Table of Contents
Phantom lives in your browser and is installable as a browser extension. It is available for Chrome, Brave, FireFox and Edge. For this tutorial, we will use the Chrome browser.
✅ In your Chrome Browser, go to this link to install the Phantom extension
✅ Click the blue "Add to Chrome" button
A new tab will open asking you to set up a new wallet or to use a secret recovery phrase to recover a wallet that you already have. We'll proceed with the first option as we assume that you are new to this!
✅ Click on the "Create New Wallet" button
This is probably one of the most important steps. You get presented with a recovery phrase. From this recovery phrase, the wallet can deduce your private key. As noted before; phantom will not store this phrase on their servers. It will store it in the google Chrome storage; but when your computer crashes or you buy a new one, you'll have to re-enter it. This phrase is literally the key to your funds held in this wallet! It's thus VERY important to have a backup of this key in case you lose it. You can store it in a secure password manager or even better, on a hardware wallet. Currently, Phantom supports Ledger's hardware wallets. A guide on how to set it up can be found here.
Here’s a guide on how to use 1Password to save your Phantom wallet secrets: