Introduction to Wallets

Introduction to wallets on Arweave

What is a wallet for blockchains?

A wallet on a blockchain is a device, program or service that stores public and private keys which in turn enable transactions with the blockchain.

The public key can be thought of as the username and the private key is like a password that must be kept safe at all times.

Any change to the state of the blockchain (information stored on chain) is considered a transaction and requires a wallet to complete.

Wallets on Arweave

Arweave is a blockchain-like system that focuses on permanent and decentralised low-cost storage solutions. It can be thought of as a blockchain database.

All kinds of data like images, videos, documents, JSON objects, even web applications, among other types, can be stored on Arweave.

For uploading this data on Arweave we need a wallet. Additionally, a wallet is needed for interacting with applications that rely on Arweave.

Wallets from a development perspective

As developers, we need to handle wallets for various uses right from providing users the ability to create transactions using these wallets on Arweave to interacting with other applications built on Arweave.

Libraries used

The functions associated with wallets leverage the following libraries:

• Arweave JS

Wallet based functions

In this section, we will look at the following functions:

• creating a new wallet

• getting a wallet address using the private key

• getting the balance of a wallet address