Your Guide to MetaMask & Decentraland: part 1

So you're attending your first Decentraland event or just dipping your toe into the Metaverse water by perusing the various spaces on this platform? Excited? A little intimidated and not sure where to start? Not to worry we've got you covered! In these tutorials we will walk you through setting up your MetaMask wallet and getting started with Decentraland. 

 First things first, to enter Decentraland you will need to set up your Metamask wallet on your desktop (Decentraland is not yet available for mobile). You may enter decentraland as a guest without signing in with your wallet, but to collect any wearables and/or poap’s (proof of attendance tokens) you will need to connect with your wallet. 

You can sign into Decentraland with a variety of different wallets but for the purposes of this tutorial, we will be using MetaMask. 

Also, even though there is reference to adding crypto or sending/ receiving funds in this article, you will not need to add funds to your wallet at this point as you won’t need it for accessing Decentraland. 

So let’s start with our Metamask setup: 

To install as a browser extension, go to Metamask.io/download choose your OS and browser click download  then install as prompted.

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Click on install MetaMask for the browser you’ve selected, the add-on’s for that browser will open. 

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Click ‘Get’ to install the extension. Then add extension. ⬇️

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Click the extension and then the ‘Get Started’ button. Choose ‘create wallet’. The other ‘Import wallet’ option is for when you want to import an already existing wallet. If you ever need to do this, this is what your secret phrase is for - but more on secret phrases in a moment!

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Now choose a secure password. The most secure and unbreakable passwords are 16 characters or longer and consist of letters, numbers and special characters. Keep this password safe in a secure password manager or vault.

Once you’ve done that, click on the terms of use box and click the ‘create’ button.

You will then be directed to the seed phrase page. You will be given a 12 word secret recovery phrase, write this down (not on the notes app on your phone) as you will be asked to input this phrase on the next page when prompted.

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So here is a good time to talk about the security of your wallet. Follow these Security best practices to keep your wallet and assets as safe as possible:

1. NEVER reveal your seed phrase/ private keys to anyone EVER.

2. Be especially mindful online, no one from MetaMask or any other organization, community or platform will ever ask for your seed phrase or private key. Anyone who does, no matter how official their communication seems or how legitimate they come across, is attempting to scam you. Once they gain access to these, they can drain your wallet.

3. It’s also recommended not to keep large amounts of currency in your hot wallet but rather to hold the majority of it in a cold storage wallet such as a ledger.

4. Make sure you keep your seed phrase absolutely safe by storing it in a vault or secure password manager. You can even break it up and store those pieces in multiple locations for extra security.

5. Never send this phrase in an email and never store it in your notes or anywhere else online or any place connected to a cloud service.

6. When connecting your wallet to a site, make sure you trust it and double check that the url is correct, many scammers will copy a website and change just one letter in the website name. When going to MetaMask for example, make sure you are going to https://metamask.io/

7. Be wary of airdropped NFT’s. It’s best to hide these and avoid interacting with them in any way.

8. When buying tokens on a decentralized exchange such as Uniswap or pancake-swap make sure you are interacting with the correct contract by copying the token contract directly over from CoinMarketCap or Coin Gecko.

Phew! Ok now we’ve got that out of the way.

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Now you can go ahead and click the ‘all done’ button! Congratulations! You’ve created your first wallet! 

Now you will want to know how to navigate around your wallet:

At the top right hand corner next to your profile is a drop down list of the networks you can connect to. By default it comes connected to the Ethereum mainnet but you can also add other networks you may need to connect with such as Binance smart chain, Polygon(Matic) or Velas for example. But for our purposes, for using Decentraland we will only need to be on Ethereum.

Also at the top right corner are three dots, click on these to view connected sites and transactions. ‘View account on Etherscan’ will open a new tab with all of your transactions and balances. 

‘Account details’ open a window which shows you your wallet address in alphanumeric form and as a QR code you can copy. Below is an example of what the Etherscan page looks like: top left are your balances and along the bottom are your transactions. 

NOTE: your wallet address is not the same as your private key or secret seed phrase. Your wallet address is a unique address created when you created your wallet. This is your public facing address and it's what you’ll use to receive crypto currency or other assets such as NFT’s. 

When sending crypto, make sure you are sending it to the correct address and that you are sending it on the correct chain. If sent to the wrong address, it cannot be retrieved. 

That’s it! You now have a MetaMask wallet and hopefully you will now be somewhat familiar with how to use it.