SNAP Basic Training 005: Wallet Safety and Token Approvals

Do not get rekt.

You can run perfect routes. You can LP with precision. You can vote with intent. None of it matters if your wallet is wide open.

Training 005 focuses on the one thing that keeps you alive in the field. Control. Your wallet is your base. Token approvals are the keys you hand out. Hand the wrong key to the wrong contract and the mission ends fast.

This session keeps things simple. No jargon. No deep cryptography talk. Just the basics that every recruit must know before stepping into live fire.

What Wallet Safety Actually Means

People talk about security like it is a checklist. It is not. It is a habit.

A secure wallet setup usually looks like this:

• One cold wallet for long term storage.
• One hot wallet for trading and experimentation.
• One burner wallet for anything you do not fully trust.

Cold wallets hold the supply. Hot wallets hold what you use. Burner wallets absorb the risk when you test something new. This separation blocks a single mistake from wiping your whole stack.

Most attacks in DeFi happen because someone mixed these roles and forgot which wallet was carrying what.

Approvals. The Silent Weak Point

When you interact with a DEX or a token contract, you approve that contract to move your tokens. That approval stays active until you revoke it. Time does not expire it. Closing your browser does not fix it. Gas prices rising does not limit it.

Approvals are powerful. Without them you could not swap or LP at all. But an approval set to unlimited gives a contract full access to the token you approved. If that contract gets compromised, the attacker can drain that token from your wallet at any time.

This is why you will see people with clear wallets still losing tokens days or weeks after a scam. The attacker used an old approval they forgot about.

Common Approval Traps

Some patterns repeat across the field.

Airdrop farms that imitate real sites
Fake sites request unlimited approvals before showing any claim page. A real protocol never forces an approval before you even interact.

Random tokens you never bought
Scam tokens often appear in your wallet with the goal of baiting you into visiting a fake site. Once there, the site tries to get an approval from you. Ignore these tokens.

Impersonator bots
A Telegram bot that tells you to approve something to receive help is almost always malicious.

High gas spikes
Scam contracts sometimes mimic gas patterns to trick people into confirming approvals without checking.

A trained recruit learns to pause and read every approval popup.

How To Inspect Approvals

There are safe public tools that help you see what your wallet has approved.

• DeBank
• Etherscan’s Token Approval Checker
• Revoke.cash
• BSCScan and similar explorers on other chains

They show all active approvals. You then revoke what you no longer need. This adds a small gas cost. Think of it as paying for a locked door at your base.

Remove approvals for old farms. Old bridges. Old tokens you do not use. Old games. Anything that is not part of your regular operations.

Understanding Approvals on SNAP

On SNAP you only approve tokens when you swap or when you choose to add liquidity. A normal approval gives the router permission to move the specific token for that action. You can revoke it later with the tools above.

SNAP does not pull tokens from your wallet automatically. Nothing in the system reaches into your wallet without you confirming a transaction. Approval is not custody. It is permission for a single contract to move a specific token when you execute a trade or LP action.

Still, keep the habit. Review your approvals each month. A clean wallet is a safe wallet.

Cold Storage. Your Last Line of Defence

Cold wallets reduce attack surfaces because they store your keys offline. No malware. No phishing site. No popup can touch them.

Move your long term stack there. Keep only what you need for weekly operations in your hot wallet.

If you ever feel unsure about a site or a contract, switch to a burner wallet. If something goes wrong, the damage stays contained.

Operational Checklist

A simple routine is enough.

• Review approvals once a month.
• Use a burner wallet for new or untrusted platforms.
• Use a cold wallet for long term assets.
• Double check every approval popup.
• Never connect your main wallet to unknown links sent by DMs or bots.
• Treat every new site as hostile until proven safe.

These habits take seconds but save years of work.

Final Briefing

Wallet safety is not a one time skill. It is a discipline you practise across your whole time in DeFi. Approvals are not dangerous by default. They are dangerous when you forget them.

Train this muscle now. It will protect you more than any strategy or incentive program.

Training 006 awaits. The field gets more complex from here.