How to Connect a Crypto Wallet to a DEX

Direct answer

Connecting a wallet to a site shares your public address and lets the site request signatures. It does not grant permission to move funds. Nothing leaves your wallet until you approve a specific prompt afterwards. The risk is not the connection itself — it is what you sign once connected, particularly token approvals.

What connecting does and does not do

Your address and its full history are public on-chain regardless. Connecting simply tells the site which address to look at.

The meaningful risk arrives at the next prompt, not this one.

Step 1 — Choose which wallet to connect

Decide before you click, not after.

Connect the wallet appropriate to what you are about to do: a trading or burner wallet for anything unfamiliar, never the vault holding long-term assets. If a wallet application holds several accounts, check which one is selected — most connect the active account, and a mis-selected account is how people accidentally expose their main holdings.

Step 2 — Confirm you are on the real site

Before connecting, confirm the domain by reading it character by character — or better, by having typed it yourself.

A cloned interface behaves exactly like the real one and will happily connect. Connecting to a clone is not itself harmful, but everything it asks you to sign afterwards is designed to be.

Step 3 — Connect

Click connect, choose your wallet, approve the connection prompt in the wallet.

The prompt should say something like "allow this site to view your address and balance". If a connection prompt asks for anything more — a transaction, a token approval — stop. That is not a connection request.

Step 4 — Understand what comes next

Now the actual decisions begin. Every subsequent prompt is a separate authorisation:

• Message signature — proves you control the address. Costs no gas.
• Approve — grants standing permission to move a token. Persists until revoked.
• Permit — the same authority as Approve, via signature, with no gas cost.
• Transaction — executes a specific action now.

The two to read carefully are Approve and Permit. See wallet-based trading.

Step 5 — Disconnect, and know what it does not do

Disconnecting removes the site's ability to see your address and request prompts.

It does not revoke token approvals. Those live on-chain, granted to a contract, and survive disconnecting, closing the browser, and clearing site data.

So: disconnect for tidiness; revoke approvals for safety. They are different actions with different effects, and conflating them leaves permissions standing that people believe they removed.

Hardware wallets

Connecting a hardware wallet works the same way, with one important addition: the device screen shows what you are signing, and malware on the computer cannot alter that screen.

Read the device, not the browser. If the two disagree, the device is right and something is very wrong.

Common mistakes

• Connecting the wallet that holds everything out of convenience.
• Not checking which account is active in a multi-account wallet.
• Believing disconnecting revokes approvals. It does not.
• Approving something because you already connected — the connection commits you to nothing.
• Reading the browser rather than the hardware device screen.

Related

• Wallet-Based Trading Explained
• How to Use a DEX Safely
• How to Protect Your Wallet