Wallet

How cshell handles wallet creation, storage, and security. Understanding these concepts is crucial for managing your funds safely.

Wallet storage

All cshell wallet configurations are stored in a single file on your local machine:

• File: cshell.toml
• Location: In your user home directory (examples: ~/cshell.toml)

This file contains the definitions for every wallet you create, import, or restore.

Security and encryption

Cshell protects private keys using a password-based encryption model.

• When you create a wallet you set a spending password.
• The password is run through Argon2 to derive an encryption key, and that key is used with the ChaCha20-Poly1305 cipher to encrypt the wallet’s private key.
• Your password is never stored on disk, it exists only in memory when needed to sign a transaction.

Caution

Because the password is never stored, it cannot be recovered. If you lose it you must restore the wallet from its mnemonic seed phrase

Unsafe wallets (plain-text keys)

Cshell supports an --unsafe option at creation time (wallet create —unsafe).

• What it does: disables password protection and stores the private key in plain text inside cshell.toml.
• Intended use: temporary, disposable wallets for development or testing only.

Caution

Never store real funds in an unsafe wallet. Anyone with access to cshell.toml can control those funds

Importing vs restoring wallets

Cshell supports both wallet import and wallet restore, these are different operations with different functional implications.

• Import: creating read-only (watch-only) wallets.
• Restore: recovering fully functional wallets using the mnemonic seed phrase.

Usage

Create a wallet using the interactive command below:

cshell wallet create

You can manage wallets using Cshell’s wallet commands. To see which wallet commands are available, run the following:

cshell wallet --help

And the --help flag can be used anywhere in Cshell. For example, after choosing the create command, you can check the options available for that command as well:

cshell wallet create --help