Picture yourself, if you will, as an early digital explorer of the boundless, near-infinite landscape of the future. The year is 2218, and gone — for better or for worse — are the days of your worn, frayed and leathered cash wallet. In its place, something sleeker has arrived: a blockchain wallet.
This is no ordinary wallet. It’s a virtual vault, a place to park your digital cash — safe and securely out of reach of hackers, malware and scammers in the wild, wild west of the digital universe.
This wallet is like your physical wallet, and it’s also a digital wallet. It has a public address for sending digital cash, and a secret private key, that unlocks your vault of digital cash like your password might unlock your email account.
Your wallet doesn’t buy, sell, store, exchange or redeem digital assets. Your wallet does have one job — and that’s make sure it’s a safe.
This wallet isn’t a magical online banking application. And it’s not PayPal, either. It’s a bit smarter, and a hell of a lot more secure.
This wallet doesn’t hold anything at all.
Everything is out there in that colorful riot known as the blockchain.
This wallet lets you interact with the blockchain.
This wallet lets you send, exchange, receive and redeem digital assets.
The blockchain is quite literally our digital future. It’s a global database secured by a network of miners, who dedicate their computer’s horsepower to rock-solid encryption, ensuring that every coin, every transaction, every account is legitimate.
But now that you’re out in the world all by yourself, you can’t actually make that a reality.
Enter Coinbase, a company created to simplify cryptocurrencies for everyone. It’s like that friendly adventurer who shows up with lots of helpful tips and a fully charged lantern. And like the most awesome adventurer you’ve ever met, Coinbase is willing to gift you $10 in Bitcoin for using their adventure guide to get started.
But that’s just the beginning. In this digital landscape there are many, many other wallets. Each address, each place within the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and the digital frontier going forward requires its own wallet with its own unique purpose and resources.
One of the exciting opportunities in this new world comes with the concept of Staked Coins. You could think of it like a treasure chest that you bury in the depths of a far away forest. You promise with all your heart to never touch it, and you “stake” your claim on the value of the coins that are within. And as a result, you earn a reward. Think about it like interest that you would find from a savings account, or like the interest from a bond. Typically these rewards, playfully called “APY” for “Annual Percentage Yield,” have been traipsing around from 0.01{c6bcb180d044a72e45e0f52bb77924dba102b21d17cab7d73b5b20f0e3d36b38} (akin to what you would earn from a typical savings account with your current traditional brick-and-mortar bank) to 25{c6bcb180d044a72e45e0f52bb77924dba102b21d17cab7d73b5b20f0e3d36b38} and sometimes even more! The coins that you support with within Coinbase are generally termed as “safer,” but as in any adventure, there is always some risk involved.
Staked Coins are like the seeds you’re going plant in the digital soil. Over time they grow and yield more crypto coins just like bank bonds or certificates of deposit. They are the secret tool to creating and leveraging creating even more Crypto Coins. So are you ready to embark on this exciting adventure?