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Ethereum New User Guide

New to Ethereum? You're in the right place! This guide will walk you through the necessary steps of getting onboarded to the Ethereum network.

Buy and/or Earn ETH

SPANK and BOOTY 🍑 are tokens on the Ethereum network. In order to interact with the Ethereum network, you will need to own Ether (ETH). Besides earning it on SPANK.live, the easiest way to acquire ETH is to buy it on Gemini or a number of other exchanges.

One important note is that you do not need to buy 1 full ETH. Ether is divisible down to 18 decimal places so you can buy fractions of it.

Setup MetaMask

If you've earned BOOTY 🍑 on SPANK.live, you essentially have ETH as BOOTY 🍑 gets converted to ETH upon withdrawal. Now that you have ETH, you will want to send it to a wallet of your choice to store it and use it on the network. Wallets setup accounts for you which are randomly generated 42 character long addresses starting with 0x. Accounts allow you to store and use ETH by generating transactions on the Ethereum network.

Important

Never use SpankPay as your main Ethereum wallet!

We recommend first moving your ETH to the MetaMask wallet. MetaMask is a browser extension that allows you to interact with Ethereum dapps inside of Chrome, Brave, Firefox or Opera.

MetaMask has a nice video to help you get setup:

After MetaMask is setup, you now have your own wallet address (0x......). You can go to your SPANK.live SpankPay card and send your acquired BOOTY 🍑 to your new wallet address (remember it will automatically convert to ETH). Likewise with ETH if you just bought from Gemini. This should take about a minute and you will see the ETH show up in your MetaMask wallet.

Setup Mobile Wallet (optional)

Every Ethereum account can be restored via a random string of words (including your SPANK.live account!). In the MetaMask setup above this was referred to as the seed phrase. It is possible to have this same account in multiple different wallets, including mobile wallets.

We recommend downloading Coinbase Wallet, clicking restore and typing in your seed phrase. With Coinbase Wallet, you own your own keys so there isn't the same risk of account closure that Coinbase's consumer exchange possesses. Your wallet is now mobilized!

Try Ethereum Applications

Now that you have ETH in a wallet of your own, you can use any of the amazing applications (sometimes referred to as dapps) that have been built on Ethereum.

There are many different types of applications built on Ethereum but here are a few suggestions to get started:

Decentralized Finance

  • Compound: Lend and borrow ETH or other tokens.
  • Uniswap: Easily trade your ETH for other tokens.

Games

Collectibles

  • OpenSea: Buy, sell and discover rare digital items.
  • Origin Protocol: Decentralized marketplaces on the blockchain.

Other

  • ENS: Buy an ENS name to give your address a more human readable format (myetheraddress.eth).
  • PoolTogether: Join a no-loss lottery for a chance to win a prize.
  • SPANK.live: SpankChain's Crypto Camsite (NSFW)

Long-term Storage

As you continue to use Ethereum, you might start to acquire more ETH and other tokens. It is highly recommended to store larger amounts of crypto in solutions such as hardware wallets and smart contract wallets which are more secure than basic account wallets.

Hardware wallets are the most-secure method for accessing your funds while online, as they do not expose your private key to the internet when signing transactions.

Smart contract wallets are wallets with unique abilities due to the power of smart contract functionality. They enable additional security and recovery features for users.

Attribution: This is altered from EthHub. Thanks to their wonderful work growing Ethereum.