How to Buy Ethereum
Updated August 2026
Buying ETH is two separate steps that get treated as one: paying for it, and getting it into a wallet you actually control. Skipping the second step is where most first-time mistakes happen, including sending a casino deposit from a balance that was never really yours to move freely.
Wallet
Your keys, your coins.
Self-custody, on your phone.
Your accounts
Receive ETH
0x71C7…976F
Sharing this address is safe — it only lets someone send funds in. Make sure the sender uses Ethereum Mainnet.
Swap
A swap is two things at once — a trade and an on-chain transaction — so it costs twice: the exchange takes 0.85% of what you trade, and gas is paid in ETH on top. A plain send only costs the gas.
Swapped
+0.0031 ETH
Both balances moved inside this same wallet — a swap never hands custody to anyone. Nothing has reached a casino yet; that is what Send does.
Buy ETH
$100
≈ 0.0281 ETH at $3,402.15
Review your order
Two costs, and only the first is the provider's. Gas goes to the Ethereum network itself and is the same whichever route you buy through. This one delivers straight to 0x71C7…976F, so there is no exchange withdrawal afterwards and no withdrawal fee.
ETH delivered
+0.0281 ETH
The balance behind this sheet has already moved, and it is in your custody from the moment it lands. Buying on an exchange instead leaves one more step — a withdrawal, with its own fee — before the ETH sits in a wallet you control.
Step 1/5: Create a wallet
Install a self-custody wallet app and choose "create a new wallet" rather than importing one that already exists.
Tap inside the phone, swipe it sideways, or use ← →.
Buying on a centralized exchange
Coinbase, Kraken and similar platforms are the most common starting point: create an account, verify your identity, deposit fiat currency, and place an order for ETH. This is the easiest on-ramp precisely because the exchange handles custody for you at first, which is also the thing worth undoing in the next step.
Why an exchange balance isn't the same as owning ETH
ETH sitting in an exchange account is an IOU from that exchange, not a balance you directly control: the exchange holds the actual private keys. "Not your keys, not your coins" is the shorthand for this, and it matters concretely for anything that needs a real wallet address, like depositing at a casino. An exchange balance has to be withdrawn to a self-custody wallet, such as MetaMask, before it's genuinely yours to send anywhere else.
Setting up a self-custody wallet
A wallet like MetaMask generates a seed phrase, a set of words that is the actual key to everything the wallet ever holds. Writing that phrase down and storing it offline, never as a screenshot or a note synced to the cloud, is the single most important step in this whole process: anyone who has the phrase has the funds, permanently and irreversibly. The wallet itself is free to create; funding it is the next step.
Moving ETH from the exchange to your own wallet
Withdraw from the exchange to your wallet's public address, which is safe to share and different from the seed phrase, which never is. Exchanges charge a withdrawal fee separate from the network's own gas fee, and the two are easy to conflate on a first purchase. Send a small test amount first if the total is significant: it costs a bit of gas twice, but confirms the address and network are right before the full balance moves.
Two separate costs: exchange fees and network gas
An exchange's trading fee (usually a percentage of the purchase) and a withdrawal fee are the exchange's own charges. Ethereum's own network gas fee, paid to validators for processing the transaction, is separate and identical regardless of which exchange you bought from. See Ethereum gas fees explained for how that figure is actually set and why it moves.
Common first-purchase mistakes
Sending ETH to an exchange deposit address that only accepts a different network, buying on impulse during a price spike rather than checking the order type being placed, and leaving a large balance on the exchange indefinitely instead of moving it to self-custody are the three that cause the most support tickets. Double-checking the receiving address and network before every send, not just the first one, avoids the costliest version of the first mistake.
Getting from a funded wallet to a casino deposit
Once ETH is in a wallet you control, depositing at any of the 15 operators in this ranking works the same way as any other on-chain send: copy the casino's deposit address, confirm the network is Ethereum mainnet, and send. See Ethereum casino payment methods for what we measured on deposit and withdrawal speed at each one.