What is wallet connection?
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 4 min
In short
Connecting a wallet opens a channel between a dApp and your wallet so that signing requests and responses can pass back and forth. Your private key never leaves the wallet. What the dApp does gain is the ability to ask you to sign, which is why stale connections are worth cutting.
Key points
- Only signing requests travel; the key stays put
- Connecting by itself moves no funds
- A QR code can pair a phone wallet with a desktop site
- Old sessions can be revoked from the wallet side
Definition
A handshake that lets a dApp ask a wallet for its address and for signatures. It may run through a browser extension or pair with a separate device by QR code.
Pressing 'Connect wallet' first asks you to reveal an address. Approving that lets the site read your balance and history, which is public data anyway, and confers no power to move anything. Moving funds still requires a signature afterwards.
To link a phone wallet with a desktop site, a QR code commonly establishes an encrypted channel between the two. The WalletConnect standard is widely supported, so the same steps tend to work across many wallets.
Sessions often persist until you end them. Open the connections list in your wallet and you will usually find sites you visited long ago. Clearing the ones you no longer use means a later compromise of that site cannot push a signing request to you.
Watch out for
- · If a signing prompt appears right after connecting with no clear reason, reject it and look into why
- · Fake sites show the same connect dialog, so the dialog proves nothing
- · On a shared computer, always disconnect when you are done