A wallet is a piece of software that keeps track of your blockchain keys and addresses, and also lets you interact with the blockchain by making transactions. There are official Stacks wallets for the desktop and browsers here. In this document, we will walk you through setting up a Stacks Wallet and making a couple of test transactions on the Stacks testnet.
During the creation of a new wallet, you will be asked to note down a 12 or 24 word seed phrase.
- DO NOT LOSE THE SEED PHRASE.
- DO NOT GIVE YOUR SEED PHRASE TO ANYONE.
The seed phrase is used to derive a private/public key pair, and your Stacks address. If you install the wallet on another computer, phone, or browser, you will need to enter the same seed phrase to access your Stacks account.
If you lose your seed phrase, and your Stacks account has STX or other tokens associated with it, you won't be able to access those tokens.
The easiest way to get started is to install the browser extension for the Stacks wallet. On this page, select the browser you use, and install the wallet.
If you have never set up a wallet before, create a new software wallet. WRITE DOWN THE SEED PHRASE YOU ARE GIVEN. You will be asked to verify the seed phrase, and then asked to set up a password.
If you ever lose your password, it's not the end of the world. You can always recreate your wallet with your seed phrase by reinstalling the browser extension.
In the wallet, click on menu (three dots), select Change Network, and pick the testnet.
Visit the Stacks explorer, and take a look at your account's details (copy your address from the wallet and paste it into the explorer's form). (Click on the Connect Stacks Wallet button if it appears.)
Stacks provides a faucet that will send 500 STX to your account on the testnet. Visit the faucet's page on the explorer, and click on the button to request STX. Clicking on the button will create a transaction that you will see on your address's page in the explorer.
It can take up to ten minutes for the transaction to be mined.
Click on transfer and send 1 STX to ST3T6RJ8DKMJ4XB7DFTER1B9SX91GYBKXT27QC6FM, with your initials in the memo field. The wallet should pop up a window and ask you to confirm the transaction.
Try calling this contract. To make the function calls, copy the contract's principal and go to this page. Paste in the contract's principal, and call the functions from the next page.
Try calling the send function first, with 100 STX, and then call the return function.
After testing your contracts locally, you can deploy them to the testnet here. Change the contract's name, paste your code into the text box, and submit.