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ForgeMeshGuide · 15 minutes · No purchase needed

Set up a wallet to get paid by bots

Pay-per-Crawl sends crawl payments straight to a wallet you control. This page gets you one, safely, even if you have never touched crypto. It is written for site owners, not traders: you are creating an account number that can receive USDC, and protecting the one secret that controls it.

The one rule. Your wallet will give you a list of twelve words called a seed phrase (also "recovery phrase" or "secret phrase"). Those words are the money. Write them on paper, keep the paper somewhere safe, and never type them into anything except the wallet app itself when restoring it. Everything else on this page is detail.

What a wallet actually is

A wallet is not an account at a company. It is a pair of keys generated on your device. One is public: a 42-character string starting with 0x that anyone can send money to, the way anyone can pay into an account number. The other is private and is what the seed phrase encodes. Whoever holds the private key can move the funds, and nobody, including the wallet maker, can reset it, freeze it or recover it for you.

The money itself lives on a public ledger, the Base network. The wallet app is just a window onto it. If your laptop dies, you install the app on another machine, enter the twelve words, and the same address with the same balance is back. If you lose the twelve words and the laptop, the balance is still on the ledger, visible to the whole world, and reachable by nobody.

Crawlers pay in USDC, a dollar-pegged token, on Base, a low-fee network run on top of Ethereum. Receiving is free. You only ever need a tiny amount of ETH on Base (a dollar or two) if you decide to move the USDC somewhere else later.

Security habits, in order of importance

The seed phrase is the wallet

Twelve or twenty-four words. Anyone who has them has the money, from anywhere, forever. No company can undo a transfer.

Nobody legitimate will ever ask for it

Not MetaMask support, not Coinbase, not ForgeMesh, not a "validation" page, not a wallet "sync". Every request for the phrase is theft.

Paper, not pixels

Write it by hand. No photo, no screenshot, no note app, no email draft, no cloud password manager. Phones and laptops get backed up to places you do not control.

Two copies, two places

Fire, flood and a lost bag are more likely than a hacker. A second copy at a different address covers all three.

The address is public, the phrase is not

Your 0x address goes on your website, in the plugin, in invoices. That is fine. It is an account number, not a password.

Type URLs, do not click them

Fake wallet sites rank in search ads and arrive in DMs. Bookmark the real one the first time and only use the bookmark.

Check the first and last characters

When you paste an address anywhere, read the first four and last four characters back. Malware that swaps clipboard addresses exists.

Separate the wallet from your daily browser

A browser profile used only for the wallet, with no other extensions, removes most of the ways an extension gets attacked.

Option 1: MetaMask, step by step

MetaMask is the most widely used browser wallet, works on Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Edge, has phone apps, and supports Base out of the box. It is a hot wallet: the keys live on the device, protected by a password you choose. Good for receiving, fine for modest balances.

  1. Open a fresh browser profile. In Chrome: profile icon → Add. Name it "Wallet". No other extensions go in it, ever.
  2. Type metamask.io into the address bar yourself and click Download there. It sends you to the official store listing. Do not install from a search result or a link someone sent you.
  3. Create a new wallet. Choose a long password. This password only protects the app on this device; it is not the seed phrase and cannot recover anything on another machine.
  4. Reveal the Secret Recovery Phrase and write it on paper. Number the words 1 to 12. Check spelling. MetaMask will quiz you on a few words; do it from the paper, not from memory, so you know the paper is right.
  5. Make the second copy now, on a second sheet, and put it somewhere else: a relative's house, a safe deposit box, a locked drawer at work. Do not photograph either sheet.
  6. Add the Base network. Click the network name at the top left (it says Ethereum Mainnet) → the Base entry under popular networks → Add. If you ever have to enter it by hand: name Base, RPC https://mainnet.base.org, chain ID 8453, currency ETH, explorer https://basescan.org.
  7. Copy your address. Click the account name; the 0x address copies to the clipboard. Paste it somewhere visible and read the first four and last four characters back against the app.
  8. Paste it into Pay-per-Crawl settings as the payout wallet. The plugin checks the format. Save, then open basescan.org/address/<your address>: that page is your statement, and it will show every crawl payment as it lands.
  9. Optional but wise: a test transfer. If you have a friend or a second wallet, receive one dollar of USDC first and watch it appear in MetaMask. If USDC does not show, use "Import tokens" and pick USDC on Base; the balance was always there, the app just was not displaying it.

Later, when a balance builds up: turn on the phone app only if you need it, keep the browser profile dedicated, and treat any pop-up asking you to "sign" something you did not initiate as hostile. Receiving money never requires you to sign anything.

Other options

All of these produce the same kind of 0x address and work with Pay-per-Crawl. Pick by where you want the keys to live.

Coinbase Wallet (not the Coinbase exchange app)

A self-custody wallet from the company that built Base, with a browser extension and phone apps. Same seed-phrase model as MetaMask, slightly friendlier onboarding, Base selected by default. Note the distinction: the Coinbase app is an exchange account where Coinbase holds the keys; Coinbase Wallet is a separate app where you do. Either address can receive USDC on Base, but only the Wallet gives you a seed phrase and full control. If you use an exchange address, confirm it supports USDC deposits on the Base network specifically before pasting it anywhere.

Rabby

An open-source browser wallet that shows you, in plain terms, what every transaction will do before you approve it, and warns about suspicious contracts. A good choice if you expect to interact with anything beyond plain receiving. Same seed-phrase rules.

Rainbow, Trust Wallet, Zerion

Phone-first wallets with Base support. Fine for receiving. The phone is the device at risk, so screen lock, up-to-date OS and no sideloaded apps matter more than usual.

A smart account or embedded wallet

Some services create a wallet for you behind an email login and recover it through their systems instead of a seed phrase. Convenient, and fine for small amounts, but you are trusting that company's security and continued existence. For a payout address you expect to use for years, prefer a wallet whose phrase you hold.

Cold wallets: when and why

Everything above is a hot wallet: the private key sits on a device that is also online, browsing the web, running other software. A cold (hardware) wallet keeps the key inside a small dedicated device that never exposes it. Transactions are prepared on your computer and signed inside the device, which shows you the amount and destination on its own screen before you press a physical button. Malware on the computer cannot sign anything.

You do not need one on day one. A reasonable line: when the balance is more than you would shrug off losing to a browser bug or a convincing phishing page, move it. The common pattern among site owners is to keep the hot wallet as the receiving address pasted into the plugin, and sweep to the hardware wallet once a month. You can also point the plugin directly at the hardware wallet's address; receiving still needs no signing, so the device only comes out when you want to spend.

  • Ledger (Nano S Plus, Nano X, Flex, Stax). The widest software support, Base and USDC included. Buy from Ledger directly. That is an affiliate link; it funds this site at no cost to you.
  • Trezor (Safe 3, Safe 5). Open-source firmware, also works with MetaMask and Rabby as the signing device.

Buy hardware wallets only from the maker's own store. Never second-hand, never from a marketplace seller, never one that arrives with the seed phrase already filled in on a card. A pre-seeded device is a theft waiting for your first deposit. On first use the device must generate a brand-new phrase in front of you.

The same paper-and-two-places rule applies to the hardware wallet's phrase. The device is replaceable; the phrase is not.

Things that look like problems but are not

  • USDC arrived but the balance shows zero. The app is not displaying the token yet. Import tokens → USDC on Base. Check basescan.org to confirm it is there.
  • A tiny unexpected deposit, or a transfer you never made in your history. Address poisoning: someone sends dust from an address that looks like yours, hoping you copy it from history later. Ignore it, never copy addresses from history, and read our note on dust attacks.
  • Random tokens or NFTs appearing. Airdropped bait. Do not interact with them, do not try to sell them; leave them hidden.
  • An email saying your wallet needs "verification" or "migration". Wallets have no accounts and send no emails. Delete it.

Tax and records

Crawl payments are income in most places, in the currency value on the day received. Your basescan address page is a complete ledger with timestamps and amounts, and Pay-per-Crawl Pro exports a settlements CSV with the transaction hash on every row for a bookkeeper. Keep the address you use for the site separate from any personal wallet so the statement stays clean.

Set up Pay-per-Crawl Other platforms[email protected]

This is a setup guide, not financial advice. ForgeMesh never holds your keys or your funds, and will never ask for a seed phrase.

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