Before you connect anything

Official links, and how not to get spoofed

The fastest way people lose money in crypto is not a market crash. It is connecting a wallet to a fake website that looks exactly like the real one. Scammers clone these sites down to the last pixel, buy ads so the fake ranks above the real one, and drop links in emails, messages, and comments. The moment you connect and approve a transaction, the money is gone, with no reversing it and no one to call.

The one habit that protects you. Never reach these sites through a search engine, an ad, an email, or a message from anyone. Type the address yourself the first time, confirm it matches the list below, then bookmark it. From then on, only open these sites from your own bookmark. If a site ever looks slightly off, or the address is not an exact match, close it and start over from your bookmark. When in doubt, do nothing.

Exchange

Coinbase
Buy and sell, the on-ramp in this book.

Wallets and devices

Ledger
Hardware wallet, and the Ledger Wallet app.
Trezor
Hardware wallet.
Rabby
Browser wallet for Base and other EVM networks.
Phantom
Wallet for Solana.

Protocols

Morpho
Lending and borrowing on Base.
Lido
ETH staking into stETH.
Jupiter and Jupiter Lend
Lending and borrowing on Solana.
Uniswap
Liquidity pools on Base.
Orca
Liquidity pools on Solana.

Security tools

Revoke.cash
Shows which apps can touch your wallet, and cancels the ones you no longer use. A periodic cleanup shrinks what any bad actor could reach.

Research (read-only, no wallet connects)

DeFi Llama
Compare yields and check how large and trusted a protocol is. Its directory also links out to each protocol's own official site, a safe way to reach the real address.
Impermanent loss calculator
Estimate the cost side of a liquidity position before you enter one.
TradingView
Free price charts. Draw horizontal lines at recent support and resistance to set a liquidity range where the price has already shown it likes to trade.

A last word

If a stranger, a group chat, or an ad is pushing you toward any site, that alone is a reason to slow down. The real sites do not need to chase you. They will be right where you bookmarked them.