So as many of you know, I am very much into the Helium Blockchain. Running Helium hotspots is a great second income earning opportunity, but I would caution everyone about one thing – Do not walk around with copious amounts of HNT on your phone. I am a staunch believe in using Hardware wallets and while Ledger does not officially support Helium, the Devs at Helium has made this possible.
It is important to understand a couple things about the Helium app for Ledger:
- It is listed as Experimental, so you must run your Ledger in Developer Mode.
- The technology that enables the Helium blockchain to run on the Ledger (RUST) is not experimental, it is comes standard with any Ledger hardware wallet.
- You should verify that you are using the CLI Helium wallet program from this link and this link only. Beware of imposter programs that can be used to steal from you. Always make sure that you are on the official Helium Github Repo.
Getting Started
You will need a couple things – Ledger Wallet Nano S or Nano X (I recommend the Nano X), a computer and the Helium App on your phone.
The Process is very Simple:
- Connect your Ledger Wallet to your computer
- Login to the Ledger Live App and go to Settings.
- In settings, you will go to the Experimental tab and select Developer mode.
- Next, we will find the Helium app on Lodger Live and install it to our Wallet.
- Once you have installed the app on your Ledger, shutdown Ledger Live.
- Then, head over to the Helium Github Repo and download the correct version for your operating system (Mac, Windows and Linux are supported). I suggest saving the Helium-ledger-cli app in your User folder, this makes it easy to find when operating from the Command Line.
- Mac and Linux users will open “Terminal” on their machines, Windows users can easily do this by typing “CMD” in the search on their toolbar and then pressing enter.
- At this point, you should be seeing a command line interface.
- On your Ledger Wallet, select the Helium App in the interface.
- You will be presented with a message that says “Pending Ledger Review,” click to accept it.
- Now, your Ledger should say ” Waiting for commands”
- If you are at this point, Mac users will type ./helium-ledger-cli balance Windows users will type helium-ledger-cli balance
- You should then see your Hardware wallet address appear.
If you are like me and not really excited about typing in a long address with the possibility of making a mistake, I have a workaround. Simply copy your wallet address and then go to the Version 1 Helium Explorer to paste it into the search bar. When you go to that wallet address, you will see the balance is Zero and you will have a QR code that you can scan to send HNT to the address. I made a screenshot of this so that I can easily deposit to my hardware wallet anytime; feel free to send me some if you want to try LOL.
So for your first transaction, I would suggest a small amount such as .5 HNT. Wait until the transaction is complete and check on the explorer that your transaction went through.
Once you verify that your Ledger account is receiving HNT, send a test transaction back to your phone by using the following command – Mac users ./helium-ledger-cli pay <address> <amount> And Windows users helium-ledger-cli pay <address> <amount>
Now, you have a safe place to deposit your tokens and won’t be walking around town with your savings in your pocket 🙂
I hope this tutorial has been helpful. Remember to always check to make sure you are downloading the Helium Ledger CLI wallet software from the official Helium Github Repository.