Three names, one account
The first thing to get straight is that you are not choosing between wallets. Search results treat Nimiq Pay, the Nimiq Wallet and Keyguard as competitors, and they are not: they are layers of one system, and most people end up using more than one of them with the same account.
What each piece actually is:
| Piece | What it is | Where it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Your account | A key, and the addresses derived from it. This is the thing that owns NIM. | Wherever you keep it |
| Keyguard | The component that stores the key and signs with it. Never shows it to anyone. | Its own isolated origin inside your browser |
| Nimiq Wallet | The interface: balances, sending, receiving, staking. | A browser tab at wallet.nimiq.com |
| Nimiq Pay | The same account carried on a phone, built around payments. | A native app, keys held on the device |
| Nimiq Hub | The doorway other websites use to ask your wallet for a signature. | hub.nimiq.com, usually as a small popup |
So "which Nimiq wallet should I use" is really two smaller questions. Where do you want to transact, and where is your key. Answer the second one carefully and the first one stops mattering much.
Creating an account in the browser
The browser route is the canonical one. Open wallet.nimiq.com and choose to create an account. Nimiq's own litepaper describes this as three clicks, with no downloads and no personal data, and that is the part worth pausing on: there is no email to confirm, no phone number, no identity check and no application to approve. A key pair is generated on your machine, and that is the account.
What you come out with:
- An address. Nimiq addresses start with NQ and are printed in blocks of four characters, which makes them far easier to check by eye than an unbroken string.
- A password you chose. It encrypts the key in local storage. It is not a login to a service, because there is no service, so it cannot be reset by anyone.
- A prompt to save a backup. Take it. The wallet will let you carry on without one, which is a reasonable choice for a first look at an empty account and a bad one the moment there is anything in it.
Nothing has touched the chain yet. Per the developer documentation, a basic account is created on chain when NIM is first sent to it, so until somebody funds it your address is simply a key you hold. You can add more addresses under the same account later, and an account can also be a Ledger hardware wallet rather than a browser key.
What Keyguard is, and why it sits apart
Keyguard is the piece nobody chooses and everybody uses. It is not an app you install or a wallet you sign up for: it is the part of Nimiq that holds private keys and performs signatures, and it runs on a separate, isolated origin so that no page can read what it stores. The litepaper puts it plainly, describing keys held locally and fully encrypted in private browser storage, on their own secure origin, isolated from other websites.
The developer documentation draws the same line as a trust boundary: the requesting application is untrusted, the Hub is semi trusted, and Keyguard is the only fully trusted component. Even a backup export runs inside Keyguard, so the app that triggered it never receives your recovery words. It is not being polite about it. It structurally cannot see them.
Two practical consequences for you. First, when a website asks you to sign something with Nimiq, the window that appears is drawn by Nimiq's code and not by that website, so the address, the amount and the recipient you are approving are reported by the trusted layer. Check them there. Second, a site can be compromised without your key being compromised, which is exactly the property the separation exists to buy.
Putting the account on a phone: Nimiq Pay
Nimiq Pay is the mobile half of the same story: a self custodial payments app published by Nimiq Labs, holding the keys on the device rather than on a server. Nimiq's Nimiq Pay page describes connecting your Nimiq Wallet to the app, which is the relationship in one line: it is your account, on your phone, in an interface built for paying rather than for administration. Its App Store listing named NIM, BTC Lightning and USDT on Polygon when we read it on 14 September 2026, while Nimiq's own page still describes parts of that as arriving, so treat the asset list as something to check rather than something to quote.
The custody model inside the app matches the browser one. Mini apps that run inside Nimiq Pay talk to the wallet through a provider, and the documentation for them is explicit that the wallet performs every cryptographic operation, that keys never leave it, and that the user approves each sensitive action in a native dialog. A mini app cannot read your key any more than a website can read Keyguard's.
Nimiq Pay is also how a phone signs for sites like this one. When you open our stake dialog on a desktop it goes through the Nimiq Hub; on a phone it goes through Nimiq Pay. Either way the signature happens in the wallet, and we never see a key.
Self custodial, stated without the marketing
Both interfaces are self custodial, which is usually sold as a feature and is better understood as a trade. You get three things:
- Nobody can freeze the account, because nobody else holds it.
- Nobody can spend from it, for the same reason.
- Nobody needs to approve you having one. There is no application and no gatekeeper.
And you take on one thing: there is no recovery desk. No password reset, no support ticket, no identity check that restores access. If the key is gone and the backup is gone, the NIM is unreachable, and that is not a policy anyone can make an exception to. This is the entire reason the next section exists.
The first four things to do with a new account
- Make a backup and put it somewhere offline. Nimiq offers more than one way to do it, including recovery words, an encrypted login file and the newer backup codes, and we will compare them properly in a later guide. Whichever you use: write it down or store it away from the device, never type recovery words into a website, never photograph them, and never send them to anyone. No legitimate person will ever ask for them. Not Nimiq support, not a validator, not us.
- Label the account and the address. Labels live in your own interface and cost nothing, and they are what stops you sending to the wrong one of your own addresses later.
- Move a small amount first. Send a little NIM in, send some back out, and watch it confirm. Learning the flow on an amount you do not mind is cheap practice, and it verifies your address really is yours before anything larger arrives.
- Then, if you want to, stake. Staking is on chain delegation and keeps the NIM under your own key, so it is a reasonable next step once the backup is done. The walkthrough is in how to stake NIM.
So which one should you use?
Pick by where you actually transact. If you are at a desk, managing an account, staking or checking history, the browser wallet is the fuller interface. If you are paying someone in a shop or splitting a bill, that is the phone. Most people who use Nimiq for a while end up with both, which is fine, because underneath them it is one account and one key.
If you got here before the chain itself made sense, start with what Nimiq is. Everything else we have written for newcomers is on the Learn hub.