Get a wallet

A wallet is the thing that holds your coins, and it is the first thing you need. It is worth ten minutes of care, because almost everything that goes wrong in crypto goes wrong here rather than on the chain.

What a wallet actually is

It is not an account with us. We do not create it, we cannot see it, and we cannot get into it.

A wallet is a pair of keys. The public half is your address, which you hand out to anyone who wants to pay you. The private half signs transactions, and whoever holds it owns the coins. That is the whole system.

When you set a wallet up it shows you a seed phrase, usually twelve or twenty-four words. Those words are the private half in a readable form. Anyone who has them has your coins, on every device, forever.

The rules about your seed phrase

There are only four, and they never change.

Write it on paper. Not in a screenshot, not in a note on your phone, not in an email to yourself, not in a password manager you also use for websites.

Never type it into a website. Not to claim anything, not to verify anything, not to unlock anything, not to fix anything. No legitimate site ever asks for it, including ours.

Never show it to a person. Not to support, not to a moderator, not to somebody helpful in a chat who offers to sort your problem out. Everyone who asks is stealing from you, without exception.

Nobody can recover it for you. Lose the words and the coins are gone, permanently, with no appeal to anyone.

If you have ever typed your seed phrase anywhere at all, treat that wallet as compromised. Make a new one and move everything now, not later.

Choosing one

Any wallet that speaks Ethereum works here, because this is an EVM chain. There is no special L2 Protocol wallet and you should be suspicious of anything claiming to be one.

Practical guidance rather than a recommendation:

A browser extension is the usual starting point and is what most people use with our sites. Install it only from the official website of that wallet, never from a search advert, and never from a link somebody sent you.

A hardware wallet keeps the private key on a small device that signs without ever exposing it. If you are holding an amount you would be upset to lose, this is the answer, and it works with the same sites.

A phone wallet is fine, with the same rules about where you install it from.

Whatever you pick, back up the seed phrase before you put anything in it.

Add the chain

Most wallets offer to add the network when you press connect on one of our sites. Connect to the network has the values if you would rather add it by hand, and the check that tells you it worked.

Getting your first L2P

Coins arrive in an address in one of three ways.

Somebody sends them to you. They need your address, which is safe to share. Ask them to send a small amount first and confirm it arrived before they send the rest, every time, with every counterparty.

You earn them. Delegating stake to a validator pays a share of what that validator earns. That needs L2P to begin with, so it is a way to grow a holding rather than to start one. See Delegate and rewards.

Through a route the project announces publicly. When there is one, it will be on the official sites and in this documentation.

That last line is the important one. If somebody offers to sell you L2P in a private message, in a chat group, or through a site you found in an advert, it is a scam. This is a young chain and that makes it exactly the sort of thing scammers advertise. There is no rush that justifies skipping the check.

Before you send anything anywhere

You need a small amount of L2P in the address to pay transaction fees, even to move coins out of it. Gas and transaction fees explains why, and how little it actually is.

If something goes wrong

Ask before you act, not after. Open a ticket at support.l2protocol.com and describe what you are seeing. Nobody there will ever ask for your seed phrase, and if anyone claiming to be us does, that is how you know it is not us. See Getting help.