Arweave.app Web Wallet
Here you will find a step-by-step guide on how to set up an Arweave.app web wallet
If you have an existing wallet you should already be familiar with the basics, however if it’s your first venture into the wonderful world of Arweave: don’t sweat it, because we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to ensure that you can get up and running in no time.
Getting Started
Setting up your wallet is super easy, simply open up https://arweave.app in your browser. Arweave.app is a community developed, open source, project that gets you started on Arweave with a minimum of effort. Upon arrival you'll be presented with the welcome screen.
If you're a new arweave wallet user, continue on to the next section. If you're an existing user who already has a keyfile, you can skip to the 'Existing Users' section further down the page.
New Users: Generating Your Wallet
Click the "Create new wallet" button on the screen that appears.
Immediately you'll be presented with a 12 word passphrase. This is a secret code that will allow you to recreate your wallets public and private key pair. Write this phrase down on a piece of paper, place it in a ziplock bag (to protect from water damage) and store it in a safe and secure location. This is your way to recover your wallet and its contents if your computer ever stops working.
It will also let you store your key pair in wallet applications on other devices. It may take a few seconds for the keys to finish generating but once they do you'll see the button change to look like this.
Click the button to proceed 😀
Congratulations, you've added a new wallet key pair. The line of text that looks like some kind of code is your wallet address. In the image above the wallet address is omsGXfLHi0AeE144E0uQXaNxsRoaftzPjq2TxaZyDLg. Wallet addresses are public and sharing them will not compromise the security of your wallet.
Arweave.app generates a unique icon for each wallet key pair you add to help distinguish them from one another visually.
Along with your 12 word passphrase, you can also download your public/private key pair in a key file. The 12 word passphrase will be able to recreate this file if you lose it, but it's often convenient to have a copy of the key file as well. Not all wallet apps support restoring from a passphrase.
Click the "Download" button. This will initiate a download of the key file.
This key file is for your newly generated Arweave wallet that you must keep safe and secure. By safe and secure, we mean keeping it protected from loss or misplacement as it’s not possible to regenerate. In simpler terms: once it’s gone, it’s gone! We always recommend storing it in a safe location on multiple (at least 3) devices. We also recommend that you encrypt the file, as anyone who has access to it also has access to your wallet.
You only have one chance to download the key file, however if for some reason the download couldn’t be completed, you can start the process all over again and a fresh wallet will be generated.
Key File: Your key file will be called something like omsGXfLHi0AeE144E0uQXaNxsRoaftzPjq2TxaZyDLg.json. The filename is your unique wallet address + ".json". Wallet addresses are 43 characters long and can contain any alphanumeric characters, as well as dashes and underscores (a-z0–9-_). Your key file is a standardized and interoperable format called JSON Web Key, which you can read more about here.
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New Users: Managing your key pairs
In addition to downloading the key file to your computer/hard drive, a copy of the file will also exist in local storage for the arwave.app page. Don’t worry though, your browser storage is secure and there are lots of mechanisms to stop malicious content (like websites and other extensions) from accessing it. However this doesn't stop someone with physical access to your machine from using your wallets. Once you've stored the passphrase and/or key file for your wallet key pair you can safely delete them from the arwave.app wallet app, knowing you can re-add them later. It's a good idea not to keep wallet key pairs with a lot of AR tokens in the arweave.app wallet for this reason.
Existing Users: Loading Your Wallet
If you already have an Arweave key file, you can dive straight into loading your wallet by dragging and dropping it onto the "Passphrase" area.
Wallet Options & Multiple Wallets
You can navigate between loaded wallets by clicking their unique icon in the top left.
Removing a key pair from the wallet
From this screen you'll be able to re-download the key file for a particular wallet key pair or click the "Delete" button to remove it from the wallet app entirely. As long as you have your passphrase or key file you'll be able to add it back whenever you like so keep those safe and secure.
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