Prax Wallet Interactive Guide

Welcome to the interactive guide for the Prax Wallet web extension, a browser wallet extension for Penumbra. Prax Wallet is open-source software that runs entirely on your computer.

This step-by-step tutorial is designed to help you navigate and use the Prax Wallet effectively. Please follow each section in order to ensure the best experience.

Installing the extension

The Penumbra Wallet web extension only supports the Google Chrome browser. You must run Chrome in order to follow the instructions below.

Visit the Web Store page to download the Prax Wallet (opens in a new tab), and click Add to Chrome to install it.

Generating a wallet

When you first open the extension, you'll be offered to import a pre-existing wallet. If you don't already have one, choose Create a new wallet. During the guided tutorial, you'll need to set a passphrase to protect your wallet. The passphrase is not the same as the recovery phrase. The passphrase is used to restrict access to the web wallet on your computer. The recovery phrase can be used to import your wallet on a fresh installation, or on a different machine. Make sure to store both the passphrase and the recovery phrase securely, for example in a password manager.

Re-enter portions of the recovery phrase when prompted, to confirm that you've saved it properly.

Select your preferred RPC endpoint

Once you import or generate a wallet, you will be prompted to select an RPC endpoint, which is the URL the extension uses to sync with the network. These are hosted by the community (including yourself, if you like), and those provided in the UI are typically offered by known validators. You may also provide your own custom endpoint, whether that is a community provider not provided as a default option, or hosted on a node you run yourself.

Select your preferred frontend app

The extension will prompt you to select a frontend app to use with the wallet. This is a web interface that you will use to interact with the blockchain. The provided options are community-hosted frontends, and you may also provide your own custom frontend URL. Connecting a frontend to your wallet grants the frontend provider a full viewing key for your wallet in order to decrypt and display relevant information, such as your wallet balance. This means that the front-end provider has read access (only) to your wallet and all of its activity. This is necessary for the encrypted data on-chain to be parsed and rendered in a human-readable format. However, this means that you should only connect to frontend providers that you trust, because they can see any actions taken by the connected wallet by using the provided full viewing key. If you desire greater privacy than this provides, you can always run your own frontend, or utilize the command-line client, pcli, to interact with the blockchain directly.

Updating to a new version of the extension

The extension should be automatically updated every time a new version is released. You can view the latest version of the extension on the [Prax Wallet] page at the Chrome Web Store. To force a check for updates:

1. Click the three-dot icon in the top right corner of the browser.
2. From the drop-down menu, choose Extensions -> Manage Extensions.
3. Select Update on the top panel.

After updating the extension manually, it may be helpful to clear the local cache, as described above.

[Prax Wallet] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/prax-wallet/lkpmkhpnhknhmibgnmmhdhgdilepfghe (opens in a new tab)