Networks, Coins & Tokens

“Crypto” isn’t one thing. It’s many separate networks (also called chains or blockchains), each with its own ledger, its own rules, and its own money. Getting this mental model right prevents the most common — and most expensive — beginner mistakes.

Networks and their native coins

Each network has one native coin that it runs on:

Bitcoin the network → BTC the coin.
Ethereum the network → ETH the coin.
…and so on for THORChain, Cosmos, Solana, and others.

The native coin is what you use to pay that network’s fees. Networks are separate worlds: you cannot send BTC over the Ethereum network, and sending a coin to an address on the wrong network can lose it for good.

Coins vs. tokens

Here’s the distinction that trips people up:

A coin is the native currency of its own network (BTC, ETH).
A token is an asset that lives on top of another network — it doesn’t have its own chain. Most well-known “coins” like USDC or UNI are actually ERC-20 tokens running on Ethereum.

Because tokens ride on a host network, you pay fees in the host’s native coin. To move a USDC token on Ethereum, you need some ETH for gas. New users are often surprised they “can’t send their USDC” — they just have no ETH to pay the fee.

EVM chains

Ethereum’s design (the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM) was copied by many other networks — Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Avalanche, and more. These EVM chains share Ethereum’s 0x... address format and token standards, which is why one Ethereum-style address often works across many of them.

What “supported” means

For a hardware wallet to use a network, its firmware must know how to build and sign that network’s transactions. That’s what “supported” means — and it’s why firmware updates can add new chains.

On your KeepKey

KeepKey firmware 7.14.1 natively signs on 11 chains — Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Cosmos, THORChain, Maya, EOS, Nano, Solana, TRON, and TON (Solana, TRON, and TON are new in 7.14.1). See Supported Coins.
Through Ethereum it handles any ERC-20 token and any EVM chain; through Bitcoin it covers the Bitcoin family (Litecoin, Dash, and more). Per-chain details are in Supported Chains.
New networks arrive via signed firmware updates — see Firmware.