MEW Wallet

Welcome to this guide on securely setting up MyEtherWallet, commonly referred to as MEW. This guide focuses on the security choices you can make when setting up your wallet.

MEW is an open-source Ethereum wallet that directly interfaces with the blockchain. Using MEW, users will have fine-grain control over their crypto experience and the opportunity to learn about the Ethereum Blockchain.

This guide is focused on the Android version of the MyEtherWallet app. If you are using iOS, check out our iOS guide,

1. Introduction

This guide is focused on how to securely set up MyEtherWallet on Android. MEW is also available on iOS, as a browser-extension, and a web app. If you are using iOS, check out our MyEtherWallet iOS guide If you want to use the web app or browser extension, check out our MyEtherWallet browser guide.

MyEtherWallet was originally released in 2015 as a web app, the same year the Ethereum blockchain launched. Since then, the dev team has been busy building an ecosystem of tools for directly interacting with the Ethereum blockchain. In 2018, the MEW team released MEWconnect, which was a mobile app designed to connect your mobile device to your local MyEtherWallet instance. In 2020, the full version of MyEtherWallet came to Android and iOS - and MEWconnect was dropped from the Play store/App store.

Today, MEW gets over 4 million visits per month to its web app, and the numbers on the mobile app keeps rising. MyEtherWallet is a good choice for you if you want to have more control over your interactions with the Ethereum blockchain. Everything runs client-side, this means that MEW runs on your device and does not connect to or rely on any 3rd party servers. Everything on MyEtherWallet is under your direct control.

Benefits of using MEW include

Flexibility - MEW Wallet supports hardware wallets, and supports creating multiple wallets from the user dashboard. Staking - MEW supports ETH2.0 staking directly within the app Dapp Browser - a web browser optimized for use with decetralized applications, built-in to MyEtherWallet Education - The app has a built-in portal for MEWtopia, which is a knowledge center for Ethereum DeFi - through the dapp browser, access the world of decentralized finance Buy Crypto - MEW supports buying cryptocurrency through the app Advanced Features - MEW supports offline usage, signing transactions, and connecting your mobile MyEtherWallet account to the MyEtherWallet web app.

2. Create and setup

MyEtherWallet is a client-side interface to the Ethereum blockchain. It is non-custodial, meaning that MyEtherWallet stores all the private keys on your device, under your control.

MEW follows BIP39 to generate your wallet, which is the crypto industry standard. Under the hood, MyEtherWallet generates your wallet with the use of a recovery phrase. The recovery phrase can be used to restore your MyEtherWallet or can be imported into another wallet that supports BIP39.

When creating a new wallet with MEW, the default method is to create your wallet within the app. The more advanced method is to generate your own recovery phrase. We created detailed guides on generating your own recovery phrase.

By following the right directions, you can generate a recovery phrase that is more secure than the default method used by wallets.

In this section, you are going to create a new wallet using MyEtherWallet's default method. Let's get started.