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Table of Content

Hello, De.Fiers!
What is MetaMask? Is Metamask a non-custodial wallet?
5 steps to start using Metamask
People are Scamming
How to stay safe with De.Fi

Hello, De.Fiers!

Welcome back. I’m Chris Comrie, the marketing manager at De.Fi.

Thank you for joining us here at De.Fi. We’re going to walk through how to set up a MetaMask DeFi wallet for the very first time. The very first thing that we want to do is you can just Google MetaMask and it should pop up here. Now, one really important thing is to make sure you go to https://metamask.io (be careful, avoid phishing).

Here we are, this is their website.

What is MetaMask? Is Metamask a non-custodial wallet?

If you already know what a MetaMask wallet is, and a noncustodial wallet is, go ahead and skip forward about 1 scroll here. But if you don’t, I’m going to quickly give you an overview of what it is.

MetaMask is a non-custodial wallet.

It allows you to hold and trade cryptocurrencies and hold and trade NFTs.

What does non-custody mean?

And it’s considered, what’s called a MetaMask wallet, and it differs from Coinbase or Gemini or Binance. And that it’s, non-custodial what non-custodial means is nobody else has custody of it — only you own your private keys.

You don’t have a custodian, which means you completely own a hundred percent of what’s in your wallet, when you deposit money in a bank, or when you buy cryptocurrency on Coinbase or Gemini, they technically own that asset.

De.Fi is a non-custodial platform as well.

If you remember, you might’ve heard about bank runs. When people go in to get all their money out of a bank, and the bank says “sorry, we don’t have your money”. The bank doesn’t owe you that money. They owe you an IOU [a written acknowledgement of debt that one party owes another] on that money. Which means when you deposit money in a bank, you just own an IOU. You actually don’t own that money anymore.

That’s why they’re allowed to loan it out and make investments with it.

MetaMask wallet is just a plug-in

And sometimes pay you a very, very, very small interest rate. With a Web 3.0 non-custodial wallet like MetaMask, you have complete custody of that. You own the physical assets in a digital form, but you own them in your wallet. You own and have 100% complete control of any cryptocurrency or any NFT that is inside your wallet.

Metamask is a compatible wallet for the hardware wallet Ledger. The Metamask Wallet lets you connect your Ledger device to their platform, so you can securely display your balances and manage your transactions.

5 steps to start using Metamask

1. Let’s get rocking, make sure metamask.io and go ahead and hit download.

1. Now you have to go to the Chrome browser.

You want to hit install MetaMask for Chrome. It’s going to take you to the Chrome Web Store where you get extensions again, make sure it’s from metamask.io and click add to Chrome. And we’re going to go ahead and get started.

1. If you already have a wallet, you’ll know what to do on the next page, but since we don’t, we’re going to click “Yes, let’s get set up and create a new wallet”.

1. Now you can create a password. You can reset this password, it’s not a big deal, what you make it, but just make it something that’s not super easy to get into and click agree and continue.

I really recommend watching this quick little video.

I’ve already seen it and I already know what it says, and I’m gonna explain to you what it says, but just remember that this is basically a safety security box.

Anyone gets the key to your safety security box, they can clean you out.

Secret Phrase in MetaMask

They can take all your assets, they can take all your NFT. They can take all your cryptocurrencies. This is the key. This is the most important part of this entire video. There’s one thing that you need to remember — never give anyone your Secret Phrase, never give anyone your secret keys.

These are all kind of the same words, never show anyone, never tell anyone, because if somebody gets access to this, they can clean you out. And there’s no way to reset this. You have to write down the Secret Phrase and stick it somewhere that you can access it if you forget, but nobody else can access. This is the most important part. I can’t stress this enough. You hear scam stories all the time.

People losing tens or twenties or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of crypto, worth of NFT, worth of digital assets, because they accidentally gave out their Secret Phrase.

.And it doesn’t just happen to dummies. It happens to really smart people, too. People are scamming and they accidentally get manipulated by their social engineering. I’m not trying to scare you. I’m just trying to make sure you understand how important this is. If you’re doing this on your own, never let anyone else see it. I’m just doing a tutorial.

And I’m going to throw away this wallet. It doesn’t matter to me. You take these words and you write them down somewhere. You write them down on a piece of paper, stick it in a safe that nobody can access it, hide it somewhere that nobody can find it.

Because again, if somebody finds it, they clean you out and it hurts. I’m going to write them down right here. Again, don’t do this because I’m not going to use this wallet. This is not my wallet. It’s just a throwaway wallet. Make sure you write those down and hit next. And then you’ve got to confirm your backup Phrase here.

1. The last 5th step to set up your wallet — Hit confirm, and congratulations. You technically have made your wallet right now.

Then you just hit all done and they’re just telling you the seed phrase is now your secret recovery phrase.

If you see this page — congratulations, you’ve done it correctly.

And you’ve now made your MetaMask wallet. You’ve now made a noncustodial wallet.

People are Scamming

So, do you not share your recovery phase?

Even if someone says “Hey, let me help you. I can, you know, if you’re having problems, let me help you” Don’t do it. They’re scamming you!

This is your address number right here. That’s really important.

When you buy your cryptocurrency from an exchange like Coinbase or Gemini or Binance — this is the address that you will send that cryptocurrency to.

And I will have to walk through it in another video. I just wanted to quickly explain how to set up your MetaMask, but this is your, Address number. And it’ll display all your cryptocurrencies right here, and you can go to your activity and I’ll show you any transactions here. And then if you have NFT, this will show up there as well.

The De.Fi Risky Contract Manager

If you want to find the easiest way to avoid risky smart contract approvals and unlimited allowances, you need to use the De.Fi Risky Contract Manager.

Rather than having to manually review smart contract approvals, the Risky Contract Manager allows you to quickly and easily modify your limits and revoke approval if necessary.

It protects you from situations where you have approved a dapp with unlimited approvals and are at risk of this being used to transfer an unlimited amount of tokens from your address.

How to stay safe with De.Fi

If you want to stay safe in DeFi, follow these steps:

1. Go to the De.Fi website and navigate to the Risky Contract Manager, which can be found here: https://de.fi/shield
2. Connect your Metamask wallet to start working with the tool. In the example below, you can see how the tool displays the contracts with allowances from your wallet.

1. In the Allowance column, you can see if you have approved unlimited allowances because these are marked with an infinity sign (∞).
2. If you want to revoke some allowances from suspicious smart contracts, click on the ‘Decline contract’ option under Actions. If you don’t want to review each contract and instead want to Decline them all, choose ‘Decline All’ in the top right hand corner.
3. If you want to decline separate token allowances, just choose the token, enter the exact amount you want to allow for spending and click the Update button.

Thank you so much for joining me!

Check our guides:

Tezos Ultimate Yield Farming Guide [Infographics]
Solana Network Ultimate Yield Farming Guide [Infographics]
Fantom Network Ultimate Yield Farming Guide [Infographics]
Huobi ECO Chain Ultimate Guide for Yield Farming
Polygon Network Ultimate Guide for Yield Farming
Binance Chain Ultimate Guide for Yield Farming
EOS Ultimate Yield Farming Guide

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Good luck in farming!