Safety on the Blockchain
With the current events happening within the NFT space we at Scoop feel it is important to help everyone brush up on keeping themselves safe on the Blockchain. No matter how much of a veteran you are in the scene, it costs nothing to double check your assets are safe and secure.
Seed Phrases & Private Keys
First things first — We should all know this by now but you should NEVER share your seed phrase or private key with ANYONE. It doesn’t matter if it is your mom, your brother or your bestfriend. These are for your eyes only!
Links & Wallet Signing
We’ve all at some point in our lives gotten emails from “Princes” or stranded “Millionaires” in another country asking for a loan so that they can release their funds and make you a millionaire too. The same thing goes with the blockchain, if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. Nothing is free in this world (apart from those juicy airdrops we got, but even then we had to spend money to make money on those).
Always double check the link you are going to came from an official channel, if you are trying to access the site of an NFT, go to their official Discord. Often times enough they will have a #Official-Links channel where you will find the legitimate links. If you receive a link in a direct message from someone you have never spoken to before, chances are it is a scam. Even if your bestfriend sends you a link, check it over carefully because you never know if they themselves are trying to do something malicious or their account may have gotten compromised.
This moves us into linking your accounts & wallets to websites, just do not do it where possible. Sites that I can personally verify as being legitimate as of now for NFTs are collab.land, premint.xyz, genie.xyz, gem.xyz, nftnerds.ai, revoke.cash & moby.gg. There are more out there but these are websites that I use on a daily basis. Even then I am wary of accessing these sites and be sure that nothing has changed since the last time I used it before reconnecting.
Signing & connecting your wallet is a tough subject as personally I try to never connect my wallet where possible, if I can mint an NFT via the contract rather than the website, I will always do so. Do research, check what you are actually signing in your MetaMask before actually clicking the “sign” button.
For information on how to mint through a contract stay tuned as full information will be in the Inside Scoop e-book.
Revoking Access To Your Wallet
There are two sites in particular that I use to revoke any access I may have given an entity to my wallet and the first one is revoke.cash. This website is very simple, you connect your wallet, check what is connected and click the revoke button on the ones you no longer want to have access.
The second site I use is good ol’ Etherscan etherscan.io/tokenapprovalchecker
The concept is the same as revoke.cash. Connect to Web3 and revoke all the entities you do not want to have access to your wallet.
Malicious Tokens
You may notice at times that you get sent random NFTs & Coins to your wallet which appear to have a high value. Like you learnt earlier in the article, if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. These are “Malicious Tokens”, interacting with these tokens can compromise your wallet. Just ignore their existence, hide them if they are on Opensea and go about your life. No one is randomly going to send you $500k, I promise you.
Alt Wallets
Another way you can keep yourself safe is to create what we call a “Burner Wallet”. These are alternative wallets to your main so that you can use them to mint through websites that you do not trust and all things of that nature. The idea of having a burner wallet is that nothing malicious will be able to interact with your main wallet, leaving your wallet untouched if the unfortunate was to happened and your burner got compromised.
More information and safety tips to be shared with the upcoming Inside Scoop e-book.
Written by Birkin
@0xBirkin
@ScoopComics
discord.gg/Scoop
