- What it is
- A receiving address belonging to a wallet you control, together with the record of a small transfer that arrived and was confirmed.
- How you get one
- Create or open a wallet you hold the keys to, take a receiving address from it, send something trivial, and watch it land.
- Where to keep it
- Written with your other notes and stored in the sending wallet's address book, so it is not retyped under pressure.
- How it goes wrong
- The address is copied from a wallet whose recovery material you have lost, making it a destination you cannot spend from.
- What fails without it
- A balance stays parked because moving it requires a decision you have not made, and parked balances accumulate risk quietly.
- Time to acquire
- An evening including the test transfer, most of that spent waiting for confirmation rather than doing anything.
The address and the proof are one item
An untested address is a guess. It looks correct, it was produced by a wallet you believe you control, and none of that is evidence. The proof is a small amount sent to it that arrived, showed up in the receiving wallet, and could then be moved again. That last step is the one people skip, and it is the step that distinguishes an address you can receive at from an address you can actually use.
So this artifact has two halves: the string itself, and a note saying it was tested and when. Keeping the note matters because in three months you will not remember whether you tested this one or the one before it.
Testing with something small
Send an amount you would shrug at losing. Wait for it to confirm properly rather than for it to appear as pending. Then move it out of the receiving wallet to somewhere else, even back where it came from, to confirm the receiving side can spend and not merely display.
The whole exercise costs a fee and some patience. It is the cheapest insurance in this entire stage, because the alternative is discovering the problem while moving an amount that matters, at which point the problem is no longer a test.
Why this belongs at the start of the stage
It reads like an end of story item and it is not. The balance plan has a third line about when value leaves, and that line cannot be written honestly if it points nowhere. Setting the target up first makes the plan writable. Setting it up last means the plan sat incomplete for however long it took you to get round to it.
There is also a timing argument. Testing takes an evening and involves waiting. Nobody wants to discover that on the night they want a wallet emptied.
Keeping it apart from the wallet you spend from
The target should not be another address in the same wallet you pay from. Moving value between two addresses in one wallet achieves very little beyond a fee, since the same recovery material still governs both. A separate wallet with its own phrase gives the move an actual effect.
How separate is a judgement, and it is your judgement rather than something a reference page can settle. Different wallet, different phrase, ideally on different storage, is the version most people land on. What matters is that you can say out loud what the separation is protecting against.
Signs a target has gone quiet
- You cannot remember when you last opened the receiving wallet.
- The recovery phrase for it is somewhere you have not physically seen in a long time.
- The wallet software has not been opened through a machine change or a reinstall.
- You have the address written down but no record of ever having tested it.
- The address came from a service rather than from a wallet whose key material you hold.
Any of those is a reason to run the small test again before relying on the target. Retesting is cheap and the confidence it produces is real rather than assumed. If the wallet turns out to be unreachable, that is far better learned now than during the one evening you needed it. The habit of retiring and replacing items like this is covered in retiring an item, and the same reasoning applies to a spare address kept for other reasons.
Questions that come up
Can the target be an account at a service rather than a wallet?
It can be, and this page will not argue you out of it, but understand what changes. An address at a service is a destination you can receive at under somebody else's terms, which is a different thing from an address you control. If you go that route, hold no illusions that the test transfer proved control, because it proved delivery only.
How often should the test be repeated?
After anything that changes the receiving side: a new device, a reinstall, a wallet upgrade you were nervous about, or a long enough gap that you have lost track. There is no schedule worth printing here. The honest trigger is the moment you notice you are assuming the target works rather than knowing it does.
What if I only ever move small amounts?
The reasoning holds at any size, but the effort should scale. For small amounts a single test and a written note is proportionate and nobody needs more ceremony than that. The reason to build the habit while the stakes are low is that it is already in place, unexamined and working, by the time the stakes are not.