The word is misleading. A wallet does not hold anything: your coins and your pieces are entries on the blockchain. What a wallet holds is the key that proves they are yours.
Keys, in two lines
- A private key is a secret number. Whoever has it can spend what belongs to it. It is the wallet.
- An address is derived from that key and is public. It is where people send you things — like an account number that reveals nothing.
You can share an address with anybody. You share a private key with nobody, ever.
Why this is not an account
An account belongs to a company, which can reset your password, freeze it, or close it. A wallet belongs to whoever holds the key. Nobody grants it and nobody can take it away.
The trade runs both ways, and the second half is what surprises people:
| An account | A wallet | |
|---|---|---|
| Who can block it | the company | nobody |
| Who can spend from it | you, and the company | whoever holds the key |
| If you lose access | «Forgot password» | nothing. There is no reset |
There is no recovery. Not because we choose not to help: because we do not have your key. Zoide generates it in your browser and never receives it. That is checkable in our privacy policy, and it is why backing it up is not optional advice.
On Zoide a wallet has two addresses
One for coins and one for pieces. They are not interchangeable: a piece sent to the payment address is not where anybody will look for it.
It is the single most common mistake newcomers make, and it is unfixable, so it is worth repeating: when somebody asks you for «your address», ask which one they mean.
And you cannot tell them apart by looking. The two are the same kind of address and there is nothing in the characters that says which is which. So the reliable way is to copy it from the labelled field in its owner's wallet — and, if the piece is valuable, to send something cheap first and have them confirm it arrived.
The password is not the key
When you create a wallet here you also choose a password. The password encrypts your key in this browser. It is not the key, it does not travel anywhere, and it does not identify you.
So there are two different things to keep: the backup of the wallet and the password that opens it. One without the other is not enough — see Keys, seed phrases and passwords.