Posts

A first look at WAX - Setting up a wallet and a first look at the WAX blockchain.

avatar of @crrdlx
25
crrdlx (CR for short)
@crrdlx
·
0 views
·
4 min read

The WAX blockchain has been making waves recently, most notably, through a deal with card collector company TOPPS and their release of "Garbage Pail Kids" (GPK) NFTs. Few things are more old-school and awesome than baseball cards, and few things are more cutting-edge than blockchain-based NFTs.

WAX came out of nowhere recently, at least to me. I wanted to check it out and thought I'd post a walk-along for my little experiment.

Get a wallet

To do anything, an account/wallet is needed. The WAX website at https://wax.io/ has suggestions, as below. A little research suggested the "WAX Cloud Wallet" as the easiest point-of-entry. It's worth noting, the trade-off comes at not owning your own keys. More on this later.

But, since I have zero on WAX, I currently have zero to lose. And, since I'm just checking things out, I decided to go with the Cloud Wallet.

Setting up the cloud wallet was indeed easy. You're offered the chance to login with another social media account in two clicks.

I chose to use my reddit account, then was asked to allow WAX to connect to my reddit. I was also asked for an email account to verify things and to make a password...all pretty normal. And that was it. Simple.

As a note, it is possible to sign up using an email address, rather than linking to a social media account. Just enter your email address, a password, then click "Sign Up".

I'm in

Once signed up, I had a WAX account and wallet, illustrated below:

One thing I found different is my "address" or account name (I'm not exactly sure what term WAX uses). Being used to ETH addresses or Hive keys, my account of "vjvau.wam" seemed odd. As I understand it, and I'm still learning, this is effectively my "send to" public address. If someone wished to send me WAX or a WAX-based NFT, they would send it to vjvau.wam. Apparently, that's me.

The image above of my "Cloud Wallet" shows...I have nothing. The gif below points out a few things in the wallet.

Three buttons

The Resources button is unique to WAX. It reveals three measurements the WAX blockchain utilizes: RAM, CPU, and NET. The use of these acronyms confused me at first. Initially, I thought it was referring to the power of my computer needed to interact with WAX. Nope. A little digging (mostly at this site) revealed:

  • RAM refers to how much storage I have on the WAX blockchain. As you can see on the graph, I'm over half full at 55% of my massive 5kb. What?! I have nothing and I'm half full. I'll have to investigate that going forward.
  • CPU is needed to do an action on the blockchain. Apparently, this is something a normal user shouldn't need to worry about.
  • NET refers to interacting on the blockchain. Apparently, this is also something a normal user shouldn't need to worry about.

The Send WAX button would be if I wanted to send WAX tokens to another person. I currently have zero WAX, so...

The Add WAX button would be to, well, add WAX. I've not done it yet, but it seems logical to me that I must purchase it from an exchange, then add it to my account.

Wait, not my private keys?

This is huge red flag for anyone who's been around crypto a while. The bloks.io wallet seems to be both a wallet and block explorer. And, though I'm just starting, it seems pretty strong. To get there, I clicked the button in the bottom-left (shown below):

In Bloks.io, you can see my account/address. You first have to login in the top-right and connect to the Cloud Wallet (I was already in so this is not shown). You see that I have zero of everything. What I really wanted to point out here is keys.

Back to keys

Under the "Keys (2)" tab, you see:

  • owner keys - This is a snag to crypto-folk. You see that "my" private keys are managed, owned or run by "managed.wax". It is possible to have my own private keys. That would require adding a second account, and as I understand, that requires paying a fee in WAX. I have no WAX, and since I have zero of anything to lose right now, I'll save a second account for later (but keep it in the back of my mind).

  • active keys - I understand the purpose of these on other blockchains, but I'm not sure about these on WAX. So, I'll hope back from comment here for now.

At this point, I'm in business!

A first NFT on WAX

I'm most curious about the NFT angle on WAX. I went to wax_io channel on telegram and asked if there were any free WAX NFTs out-and-about. A kind person offered to send one and asked for my "wallet". I informed him of my vjvau.wam wallet. A few minutes later, it appeared.

The Cloud Wallet shows the NFT, "Virgin-Amelia". Notice that my RAM is now at 58% (up from 55%). On Bloks.io, more details can be seen. Back on the Cloud Wallet, "Details" sends me the "SimpleMarket" marketplace where, apparently, things can be transacted.

And that's enough. I'm started. I hope this helps someone else get started too.

Lots of fun stuff. :)