How to set up XELIS Wallet — step-by-step

Head to the download page and pick the installer for your operating system.

• Windows: double-click xeliswallet-v0.1.3.exe and follow the wizard.
• macOS: open the .dmg and drag the app into Applications.
• Linux: unzip the archive and run ./xelis_wallet.

Launch the app. On first run, you'll see a welcome screen with two options: Create new wallet and Restore from seed. We're creating a new wallet, so choose the first option.

Pick a name for your wallet file (this is local — it's never shared with anyone) and choose where to store it. The default location is fine for most users.

If you're restoring an existing wallet instead, follow the recovery guide.

Your password encrypts the local wallet file. Make it at least 12 characters, mixing upper and lower case, numbers, and symbols.

Your password is not your seed phrase. The password protects this device; the seed phrase recovers your wallet anywhere.

Use a password manager — but never store your seed phrase there.

XELIS Wallet generates a 25-word seed phrase. Write it on paper in order. Two copies, stored in two physically separate, secure places.

• Do not screenshot it.
• Do not email or message it to yourself.
• Do not save it to cloud storage.

Anyone with these 25 words can access your XELIS — they're more sensitive than a password.

The wallet asks you to re-enter your seed phrase. This isn't busywork — it confirms you wrote it down correctly. If you can't reproduce it now, you couldn't reproduce it during a real recovery either.

XELIS Wallet talks to the blockchain through a node. You have two choices:

• Public node (recommended for beginners): XELIS Wallet ships with several public nodes preconfigured. Pick one and move on.
• Your own node: if you run a XELIS daemon, point the wallet at it from the in-app Settings → Network screen. See the official XELIS project documentation for daemon connection details.

Stick with Mainnet unless you're a developer testing on Testnet.

The wallet downloads chain state to verify your balance. First sync can take a few minutes; keep the app open and connected.

Once synced, you'll see your receive address and a balance of 0 XEL. You're ready.

Public nodes are convenient, but they see every query your wallet makes — which addresses you're watching, when you're online, and which transactions you build. None of this exposes your seed or your balance (balances are encrypted on-chain), but it does reveal usage patterns to whoever operates the node.

If you'd rather not trust any third party, run your own XELIS daemon. On most modern hardware it syncs in a few hours and then runs idle with negligible CPU. Point the wallet at http://127.0.0.1:8080 in Settings → Network and you've eliminated the third-party visibility entirely. The daemon source and prebuilt binaries are in the project's GitHub releases.

For users with smaller machines, "pruned mode" keeps disk usage modest while still giving you a fully validating local node — a good compromise between resource use and trust minimisation.

The wallet's network privacy is independent from the chain's transaction privacy. XELIS encrypts your on-chain balance and amounts by default, but the IP address that broadcasts your transactions is visible to whichever node receives them first. For most users that's fine. For users with elevated threat models — journalists, activists, or anyone in a jurisdiction hostile to crypto — Tor or a SOCKS5 proxy adds a network-layer anonymity layer.

In Settings → Network, set the SOCKS5 host and port to your Tor SocksPort (typically 127.0.0.1:9050) or your trusted VPN's SOCKS endpoint. Restart the wallet; outbound RPC calls now egress through that proxy. Combined with a remote public node (so no chain data lives on your machine) and a fresh wallet per pseudonym, this is the strongest network-privacy posture XELIS Wallet supports today.

Before depositing meaningful funds, run a small end-to-end test. Generate a second wallet (a clean install on the same machine is fine), send a tiny amount of XEL from a faucet or a friend to wallet A, then send a fraction of it from wallet A to wallet B. Confirm the balance updates correctly in both, find the transaction in a block explorer using the transaction ID, and restore wallet A from its seed into a third location to verify the seed actually works.

This twenty-minute exercise catches the entire class of "I followed the steps but did something wrong" problems before any of your real holdings are at stake. People who do this once never lose funds to setup mistakes; people who skip it occasionally do.