Rainbow Wallet review

Rainbow is the wallet people recommend when a friend wants their first Ethereum wallet and finds MetaMask intimidating. This Rainbow Wallet review covers where its design-first approach wins, where its two real limits bite, and how it stacks up against the wallets you would otherwise pick.

Rainbow Wallet at a glance

Design and ease of use

Rainbow's headline is design. It is widely rated the best-looking self-custody wallet, and the polish is not just skin deep: setup is quick, the home screen is calm rather than crowded, and common actions like sending, swapping and viewing NFTs are where a beginner expects them. The user experience carries across both the mobile app, on iOS and Android, and the browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge, so your web3 activity feels the same on phone and desktop. If you have ever set up a wallet for a non-technical friend, Rainbow is the one that produces the fewest confused questions, and that user-first design is why it scores a 9.2 for ease of use in our testing, the highest mark in its class.

Chains: Ethereum and its layer-2s

Coverage is Ethereum plus a long and growing list of EVM layer-2s, including Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Zora and Blast, and you can add custom EVM networks by hand. It handles ERC-20 tokens, in-app swaps and bridging between those networks, an on-ramp for buying crypto, and staking. For anyone whose activity lives on Ethereum and its layer-2s, that is complete coverage. The catch, covered below, is that this is where coverage stops.

NFTs, ENS and daily features

Rainbow treats NFTs as a first-class citizen: the gallery is one of the cleanest on any wallet, collections group neatly, and ENS names are shown throughout instead of raw addresses, so your onchain identity is a readable name rather than a long string, which makes sending far less error-prone. Combined with layer-2 support, that makes Rainbow a natural home for an Ethereum NFT collector. A built-in dApp browser lets you connect to web3 apps directly, token auto-detection keeps your balances current, and every transaction is shown in plain language before you approve it, so the security of what you are signing is easy to read for new users.

Security, self-custody and backup

Rainbow is fully non-custodial: a 12-word secret phrase is generated and stored on your device, and Rainbow says it never has access, collecting no name or email to sign up. Crucially, the wallet is open source, with its mobile app and browser extension code public on GitHub, so its security can be independently reviewed, which not every design-first wallet allows. You can add an encrypted secret-phrase backup to iCloud or Google Drive, with an offline written copy recommended alongside, and it connects to Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets on both the app and the extension for cold-storage-grade protection.

Swap fees and the EVM-only limit

Two limits keep Rainbow from a higher score. First, it is EVM-only: if you hold Bitcoin or Solana, Rainbow cannot store them and you will need a second wallet such as Phantom. Second, its in-app swaps carry a 0.85% Rainbow fee, always shown at review, which is more than you would pay swapping directly on a decentralized exchange or through a wallet like Rabby that adds no extra fee. For small, convenient swaps that is fine; for larger trades the cost adds up, so route big swaps elsewhere.

Rainbow Wallet vs the alternatives

Rainbow competes with the other big Ethereum self-custody wallets. Against MetaMask it wins on design and ties on open source, but MetaMask has deeper DeFi and dApp support. Against Phantom it loses on chains (Phantom adds Solana and Bitcoin) but wins for a pure Ethereum NFT user. Against Rabby it loses on swap cost and pre-sign safety features, but wins on approachability.

See the full MetaMask vs Phantom and Rabby vs MetaMask comparisons, or our best crypto wallets roundup, to place Rainbow in the wider field.

Price and value

Rainbow is free to download and use, like every wallet in this class, and makes its money on the 0.85% in-app swap fee. That means the wallet costs you nothing to hold crypto, and the value question is simply whether the design and ease are worth routing your swaps through it or to a cheaper venue. For a beginner or a design-minded Ethereum user, the answer is usually yes; for a heavy trader, keep the wallet and swap elsewhere.

Who should buy Rainbow Wallet

Rainbow is the best pick for beginners and design-minded users who are all-in on Ethereum and its layer-2s, especially NFT collectors who want ENS names and a clean gallery, and who value open-source code and hardware-wallet support. It is the wrong pick if you hold Bitcoin or Solana, do a lot of large swaps and want the lowest fee, or need live human support. If that describes you, a multichain wallet or a lower-fee option is the better buy.