Guide 6 - Setting up a hardware wallet for each coin

Goal

By the end of this guide you will have a hardware wallet set up, the right companion app installed for your coin, and an account that is ready to receive its first deposit. You will also know the coin-specific rules that decide whether that first deposit works: minimum balances, address formats, and what has to exist on the chain before a wallet can be used.

Every claim about which device works with which coin comes from the manufacturer's own pages and is dated. Where we found no official statement, the guide says so instead of guessing. Nothing here is a recommendation of a product or a coin.

Time needed

• Unboxing, initialising the device and writing down the seed phrase: 20-40 minutes. Do not rush the backup.
• Installing the companion app and adding the coin account: 10-20 minutes.
• Reading the section for your coin: 5 minutes each.
• The first deposit itself is covered in guide 7.

Before you start

• An exchange account and a verified identity, if you plan to move coins from an exchange. See guide 2.
• A device bought from the manufacturer or an authorised reseller. A hardware wallet that arrives already initialised, or with a pre-written seed phrase card, should be treated as compromised. Check the tamper-evident packaging as described by the maker.
• Paper and a pen for the seed phrase. Never type the seed phrase into a computer, a phone, a chat or a website. A real device asks you to write it down and confirm it on its own screen.
• The companion app from the official site only. Search ads imitate wallet apps. Use the links in the tables below, which come from the manufacturers' own pages.
• Patience with the details. The XRP reserve, the Stellar minimum balance, the Algorand minimum and the Hedera account-creation fee are all rules of the chain, not of the wallet, and a wallet cannot override them.

Steps

These are the general steps. The coin sections below add the coin-specific part of steps 4 and 5.

Step 1 - Choose a device that supports your coin

Open your coin's section below and find your coin in the table. The four makers covered here are Ledger, Trezor, Keystone and Tangem. If the table says "not supported", that is the maker's own statement on the date shown, and a different device is the only route.

Step 2 - Initialise the device and back up the seed phrase

Follow the maker's on-screen setup. Choose a PIN on the device. Write the recovery words on the paper provided, in order, and confirm them on the device. Anyone who holds the seed phrase holds your coins, and nobody at the manufacturer can recover it for you. Store it offline, away from the device. An optional passphrase adds a second secret on top; if you use one, you must back it up as carefully as the words themselves.

Step 3 - Install the companion app

Install the app named in the table for your coin. For Ledger, the coin pages name the Ledger Wallet app for most of the coins in this guide. Trezor uses Trezor Suite. Keystone and Tangem use different apps per coin, shown in the tables.

Step 4 - Add the coin account and read its activation rules

Add the account in the app. On some chains an account does not exist until it receives a minimum amount (XRP, XLM). On others it is created at the first transfer and the sender pays (HBAR). On others the account exists immediately and only the spending is limited (ALGO, ADA). Read the section for your coin below before you generate any address.

Step 5 - Verify the receive address on the device screen

Choose "Receive" in the app, then confirm the address on the device itself. The screen of the device is the only place that cannot be altered by malware on your computer. Compare the first and last characters with what the app shows. If they differ, stop.

Per-coin sections follow. Every table below was checked against the manufacturer pages cited. Support lists change with firmware and app releases, so open the linked page again before buying a device.

XRP

Account activation. At the time of writing the XRP Ledger base reserve was 1 XRP and the owner reserve was 0.2 XRP per object the account owns. To have an account, an address must hold the reserve; you cannot send the reserved XRP to others, although it can be used to pay fees. ^[1] Tangem's help center repeats the practical point: an XRP wallet must be funded with at least 1 XRP to be activated, and each token trust line needs an additional 0.2 XRP. ^[38] The reserve is set by the network and can change, so open the reserves page before sending a small first amount. ^[1]

Practical consequence. A first deposit below 1 XRP to a brand-new address will not activate it. Send enough to cover the base reserve and still leave a spendable balance.

XLM (Stellar)

Conflict between Trezor pages, resolved. Trezor's general article on supported coins lists Stellar among the coins that need third-party wallet apps. ^[30] Trezor's dedicated Stellar guide and its Stellar coin page both say the opposite: Stellar is managed in Trezor Suite. ^[28][29] We treat the two coin-specific pages as the more specific statement and list Trezor Suite, and we flag the disagreement here so you can check the pages yourself before buying.

Account activation. One base reserve is 0.5 XLM. An account must always hold a minimum balance of two base reserves, currently 1 XLM, and each subentry (trustline, offer, signer, data entry) adds another 0.5 XLM. ^[2][40] Trezor's guide gives the same figures from the wallet side: the account must hold at least 1 XLM, which stays locked, and each classic token you activate locks another 0.5 XLM plus a small network fee. ^[28] Validators can vote to change the base reserve, but the docs describe this as uncommon and likely only every few years. ^[40]

Practical consequence. Sending less than 1 XLM to a new address fails to create the account. A token such as USDC also needs a trustline before it can be received.

XDC Network

What this means. XDC Network is EVM compatible, so the official documentation says any Ethereum wallet can be used, and it lists MetaMask, Trust Wallet and others. ^[11] The Ledger page does not settle which app to use, so we do not either, beyond its own MyEtherWallet example. For Trezor we found no working official XDC page (the page we had cited returned 404), so check Trezor's current supported-coin list before buying. Keystone: we found XDC only on a generic asset list and not in the firmware changelog, so treat it as unverified and ask Keystone support before buying.

Address prefix and network parameters. XDC addresses are shown with an "xdc" prefix instead of "0x". The docs advise replacing "xdc" with "0x" when pasting into MetaMask and "0x" with "xdc" when sharing externally. ^[11] Only the prefix changes. XDC Mainnet parameters from the same page: chain ID 50, RPC URL https://erpc.xinfin.network. ^[11] The same page lists alternative RPC URLs, including https://earpc.xinfin.network. At the time of writing the primary URL did not answer our test request, so check the docs page for the current list before you add the network. ^[11] MetaMask now supports XDC Network natively and can add it from its network list. ^[11]

Account activation. We found no minimum balance for an XDC account in the documentation. You do need a little XDC for gas: the docs list 0.25 Gwei as the recommended gas price and as the average. ^[12] That is a gas floor, not a reserve.

ALGO (Algorand)

Account activation. Every Algorand account must hold a minimum balance of 100,000 microAlgos, which is 0.1 ALGO. A transaction that would take the balance below the minimum fails. The minimum rises with each asset holding and with each application the account creates or opts into. ^[3] The asset overview documents that each asset opt-in raises the minimum by 0.1 ALGO. ^[4]

Opt in before receiving tokens. To receive a token such as USDC, the receiving account must first opt in. Pera Wallet's guide notes that your wallet must be opted into USDC (asset ID 31566704) before receiving it. ^[39]

Practical consequence. A first deposit of exactly 0.1 ALGO leaves nothing for fees or opt-ins. Pera's own example test amount is 1 ALGO. ^[39]

HBAR (Hedera)

Account creation. A Hedera account is identified as shard.realm.number, for example 0.0.1234. If you send HBAR to an alias (a public key or an EVM address) that has no account yet, the network creates the account automatically. In that flow the payer of the transfer covers both the transfer fee and the account creation fee, charged in tinybars. A hollow account created from an EVM address can receive but cannot send until it is completed with a transaction signed by the matching key. ^[5] The fee table lists the account creation fee (CryptoCreate) at 0.05 USD at the time of writing. ^[6]

Practical consequence. Create the account inside your wallet first and copy its 0.0.x ID, so the first deposit does not depend on auto-creation. Token associations and exact fees are shown by your wallet.

IOTA

The wallet. The IOTA documentation presents IOTA Wallet, a Chrome browser extension, as its wallet. It can create addresses, and its feature list says you can import assets from other wallets using a 32 or 64-byte value. ^[9]

Ledger details. The IOTA guide lists the minimum IOTA app version per device: 0.9.3 for the Ledger Nano S Plus and Nano X, 1.0.0 for the Flex and Stax, and 0.9.2 for the Nano S, which needs a manual installation. Up to 10 Ledger accounts can be added to IOTA Wallet. ^[10] Ledger's own IOTA page is less specific than the IOTA documentation, so for Layer 1 use the IOTA guide. ^[10][23]

Address format. Older Stardust addresses began with "iota1" (Bech32); the Rebased network deprecates that format and addresses are now hexadecimal with a 0x prefix. ^[7] An address-owned object is tied to a 32-byte address. ^[8]

Account activation. We found no minimum balance for a Layer 1 IOTA address in the documents above. Fees are paid in IOTA, so keep a small balance for them.

QNT (Quant)

QNT is an ERC-20 token. It is not a coin with its own network. It lives in a smart contract on Ethereum; Etherscan labels the QNT token contract as ERC-20. ^[14][41] Every Ethereum transaction, including a token transfer, uses gas, and gas must be paid in ether (ETH). ^[13]

Account activation. An Ethereum address needs no activation, but a wallet that holds only QNT cannot send it. Put a little ETH on the same address before you need to move QNT. The contract address of QNT is 0x4a220E6096B25EADb88358cb44068A3248254675 on Etherscan; never send QNT to that address, because it is the contract and not a wallet. ^[41]

ADA (Cardano)

Address format. Cardano has two address families. Shelley addresses use Bech32 and a mainnet address begins with addr1. Legacy Byron addresses use Base58. Shelley kept supporting Byron-era addresses, but only base and pointer addresses carry staking rights. ^[15] The addr prefix with Bech32 for Shelley and Base58 for Byron come from CIP-19. ^[42]

Minimum ADA per output. On Cardano an output that holds tokens must also hold a minimum amount of ADA. ^[17] The live protocol parameter queried at the time of writing (epoch 660) was coins_per_utxo_size of 4,310 lovelace per byte, with a key deposit of 2,000,000 lovelace (2 ADA). ^[16] We could not find a current minimum-ADA page on the official docs site (the page we tried returned 404), so we do not state a fixed minimum; your wallet shows the exact amount for each send.

Staking from the hardware wallet. Trezor's guide says staking from Trezor Suite needs a refundable 2 ADA deposit to register the stake key, a network fee of about 0.18 ADA, that your ADA stays accessible, that staking becomes active about 10 days after the transaction confirms, and that rewards then arrive every 5 days. ^[18] Staking is optional and carries its own risks; this guide does not recommend it.

Common mistakes

• Buying a device before checking the table. Trezor does not support ALGO or HBAR, and Tangem has no IOTA entry. Check the coin first.
• Installing a look-alike app. Use only the links from the maker's own page.
• Typing the seed phrase into anything. A legitimate setup never asks you to.
• Sending less than the minimum to a new account. XRP needs the 1 XRP reserve and XLM needs 1 XLM. The send does not activate the account.
• Forgetting the gas token. QNT needs ETH, and every chain needs a little of its own coin for fees.
• Mixing up the two IOTA networks. A Layer 1 address and an EVM address both start with 0x.
• Skipping the on-device address check. The computer screen can be altered; the device screen is the check.

If something goes wrong

The app does not show my coin. Check the table for your coin and device. If the coin needs a third-party app, the maker's own app will not list it. Do not install an app from a search result; return to the maker's page.

The device is not recognised by the browser or the app. Use a different cable and port, update the app, and follow the maker's connection guide on its support site (links in the help section). Do not enter the seed phrase into any website to "fix" this.

The first deposit never arrived. Look up the transaction on the coin's explorer. If the chain shows it, the problem is the account rules above. See guide 7 and guide 10.

My Stellar or XRP account is missing after the deposit. The deposit was probably below the minimum, so the account was never created. The sender's wallet should have shown an error; check the explorer for a failed transaction.

Official help articles

• XRP Ledger docs - Reserves ^[1]
• Stellar docs - Accounts, base reserves and minimum balance ^[2]
• Algorand Developer Portal - Accounts overview, minimum balance ^[3]
• Hedera docs - Auto account creation ^[5]
• IOTA docs - Importing a wallet from a Ledger device ^[10]
• XDC Network docs - Wallet configuration ^[11]
• Cardano docs - Cardano addresses ^[15]
• Trezor - Staking Cardano (ADA) in Trezor Suite ^[18]
• Keystone - firmware changelog with supported coin apps ^[37]
• Tangem help center - Which coins and tokens does Tangem support? ^[38]
• Ledger support: support.ledger.com; Trezor support: trezor.io/support; Keystone support: support.keyst.one

Sources