TurtleCoin (TRTL) is still relatively new. If you bought in, like me, because you’ve recently discovered this gold mine, then I’m sure you’ve inevitably started asking yourself: But, how do I keep my turtles safe?

The official instructions are here: https://github.com/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/wiki/How-To-Mine-TurtleCoin-on-Windows but it’s a how-to guide on mining turtlecoin, so it isn’t obvious that it moonlights as a wallet setup guide.

With the awesome help of the official turtle discord community, I was able to successfully setup my personal, secure turtlecoin wallet.

But, if you need a personal turtle address ASAP (crypto emergencies XD), then just go to: https://turtlecoin.lol/wallet/ and generate one. Make sure to save all three keys – address, spend, and view keys. Write them down with a pen and paper or copy and paste into a textfile. Those three are your real wallet.

But currently, you can’t see your balance or interact with the turtles in your wallet without a hardware wallet. They don’t have a web wallet yet at the time of my writing this.

So, here’s how to make a full wallet:

1. Go to turtlecoin.lol and click on “Download” in the main header menu. Click on and download the Windows CLI zip file option. (If you’re using another OS, choose that. But I’m going to talk about the Windows CLI wallet only.)

2. Unzip the ZIP file. Navigate to the folder you just unzipped (default name is TurtleCoin-v0.3.0-windows-CLI)

3. Click on TurtleCoind.exe. A command prompt should come up with lots of programming text.

4. The command prompt window should be showing white walls of text with intermittent yellow and green lines here and there. This is your wallet syncing with the blockchain. Now you just have to wait about two hours for everything to fully sync.

5. When you see a green line saying that you’re fully synced, keep the TurtleCoind.exe window open. Now click on simplewallet.exe (which is in the same folder). You should see options to generate, open, or import a wallet. If you made a paper wallet on the fly, you should choose Import.

6. When you choose the Import option, everything should be straightforward :). They’ll ask you for the filename you want for your new wallet, so you can choose something like “mywallet.” Then they’ll ask for a password (remember this.)

7. Then they’ll ask for your Spend and View Keys, so input them. After answering everything, your new wallet file should be syncing.

8. The wallet file sync shouldn’t take longer than a couple of minutes. Once done, you can view your turtles balance by typing “balance.” You can type “help” to see a full list of commands available, including how to send turtles to someone.

And, that’s it! If you want to stay safe, you can always delete the folder after you’re done playing with your turtles. The true wallet are the three keys you’ve written down: Address, View, and Spend. You can repeat this process over again to recreate your wallet, and all the new turtles you’ve stored will be there waiting :).

My own TurtleCoin wallet address is: TRTLuwbEQLrQQ2PABDvMDwHzyAbi5jLSAL5YkFcwT8MyHhhbWe1F7A33pUphZ1QtZEUnzAKMu9ebAGRSsLZwBqZw6n8Njju7zyS