The recommended reading order
These guides are written to be read independently — jump to whichever one solves the problem in front of you. But if you're new to XELIS Wallet and have an hour to invest in doing this properly, work through them in order. Each guide assumes the one before it. By the end you'll have a wallet you understand, a backup you trust, and a security posture you can actually maintain.
- Setup — install the wallet, generate a seed, write it down, sync to the chain. Five minutes of attention here saves hours of frustration later.
- Backup — turn that seed phrase from a piece of paper on your desk into two durable, geographically separated copies that will still be legible in a decade.
- Security — build a threat model, lock down the host machine, and learn the three habits that defeat the most common wallet-loss patterns.
- Send & receive — addresses, fees, confirmations, and the cold-receive pattern for long-term holdings.
- Recovery — practice restoring your wallet now, with a test seed, so the real recovery is muscle memory rather than a panic.
Who these guides are written for
We assume you can install software, you know what a password manager is, and you've heard of crypto but haven't necessarily used a self-custody wallet before. We do not assume any background in cryptography, blockchain mechanics, or command-line tools. Where a guide does reach into deeper material — checksums, BlockDAG confirmation semantics, cold-storage workflows — the optional reading is clearly labelled so you can skim past until you need it.
Every guide is written and maintained by people who actually use XELIS Wallet on their own machines, run their own nodes, and have personally helped users recover funds from compromised devices. Where steps differ between Windows, macOS and Linux, all three are covered. Where a step has a common failure mode, it has a troubleshooting block at the bottom of the page.
How XELIS Wallet differs from other self-custody guides you may have read
Most self-custody guides on the open web were written for Bitcoin or Ethereum and translated awkwardly to other chains. A few specifics worth knowing before you start:
- Balances are encrypted on-chain. You don't expose your balance by reusing an address. This changes the address-management hygiene you may have learned for Bitcoin.
- Confirmations are faster. XELIS uses a BlockDAG with roughly 15-second block targets, so "one confirmation" arrives in seconds, not minutes. Settlement guidance in our send/receive guide reflects that.
- The seed phrase is 25 words. Generic BIP39 word lists won't match — XELIS Wallet uses its own deterministic encoding. Don't try to restore a XELIS seed in a wallet that expects BIP39, or vice versa.
- Fees are predictably small. You don't bid for inclusion. Bumping the fee doesn't speed anything up under normal load.
When you read advice from the broader privacy-coin or Bitcoin community, take the principles (cold storage, verified downloads, threat modelling) and ignore the chain-specific mechanics — apply ours instead.
When to stop and ask for help
If anything in these guides leaves you genuinely uncertain about a step that involves money — what to type, where a file lives, whether you're about to do something irreversible — stop. Do not improvise. Open the troubleshooting page, post in the community Telegram, or wait until you can ask someone you trust. There is no time pressure on any of this; the chain will still be there tomorrow.