What are mobile wallets?

A mobile wallet is an app on your phone that lets you send and receive crypto. In the self-custody case, it holds your keys locally and signs on the phone, which makes it brilliant for everyday use: quick payments, QR scans, and checking balances on the move. In other words, it’s your spending wallet – convenience first.

That convenience is also the risk. Your phone is online, so the attack surface is simply bigger than cold storage. In the real world, the danger isn’t usually “someone hacks the blockchain”; it’s getting tricked: fake apps, dodgy links, poisoned downloads, phishing, and signing something you didn’t understand. That’s why many people keep only smaller amounts on mobile, treat it like a cash wallet, and move long-term holdings to a hardware signer.

Trust Wallet is popular because it’s broad: one app that supports a huge range of chains and tokens, which is handy if you’re not living on a single network. The downside of being “the big one” is that attackers follow the crowd – copycat apps and lookalike sites thrive where the user base is massive. So “where did you download it from?” matters more than people like to admit.

MetaMask is the default gateway for Ethereum-shaped life: dApps, DeFi, message signing, and all the slightly chaotic things that come with it. The trade-off is that it sits at the centre of the phishing universe, and a lot of the risk is consent-based: malicious approvals, confusing signing prompts, and “signature phishing” that gets you to authorise something you didn’t mean to.

BlueWallet is Bitcoin-first and stays nicely focused. People like it for practical features such as watch-only (monitor cold storage safely) and multisig coordination. If you want Lightning, it can still do it – it’s just not plug-and-play anymore. These days you connect BlueWallet to an LNDHub backend (your own node, or a provider you trust), which is great for power users and a bit much if you just wanted “tap → Lightning works”.

A good rule of thumb is to treat a mobile wallet like the cash in your pocket: great for day-to-day spending, not where you park serious savings. Keep the balance small, install only from official sources, turn on basic phone security, and assume you’ll occasionally be tired or distracted – which is exactly when phishing wins. For larger holdings, many people use mobile as a companion instead: watch-only for monitoring, and a hardware signer for the actual signing, so your keys stay off the internet-connected device.