Understanding wallets and addresses

A wallet at Anchorage Digital isn’t necessarily an on-chain address. Sometimes the two line up one to one, sometimes one wallet pools many addresses, and sometimes several wallets sit behind a single address. Knowing which case you’re in tells you how many addresses you’ll be handing out and how your balances are organized. It helps to keep two ideas apart. An on-chain wallet is a keypair and the address derived from it, and it works on every network that shares its key derivation. An Anchorage Digital wallet is where your balances for one network live inside a vault, with its own wallet ID, name, and archive state. For how vaults and wallets fit together, see Vaults and wallets overview.

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How a wallet maps to addresses

Every wallet has one wallet ID, and that’s what the platform works with. Withdrawals and balances always name a wallet. The number of on-chain addresses underneath it depends on the network. On networks like Ethereum, your wallet has a single address and the two are easy to think of as the same thing. On Bitcoin they aren’t: you can generate as many addresses as you like, every one of them receives, and they all pool into one balance. Anchorage Digital also adds change addresses for you when you transfer, and those count toward the same balance.

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What one address can hold

A single address holds more than one type of asset. On Ethereum, ETH and every token issued on Ethereum arrive at the same address and sit in the same wallet, each with its own balance. This is why you can’t add a second deposit address to an existing Ethereum wallet. If you want a separate address, create another wallet in the vault and it gets its own. See Creating and managing wallets.

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Two ways to set up compatible networks

Some networks are close enough relatives that one keypair works across all of them. Anchorage Digital supports this on EVM, SPL, and Tendermint networks, and calls them compatible networks. When you create wallets on more than one network in the same family, you have a choice to make. You make this choice when you create the wallet, and you can extend an existing wallet’s address onto more compatible networks later. Creating and managing wallets walks through both flows.

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Try a configuration

Pick a network, decide how many networks you want to cover, and choose an address strategy. The diagram updates to show the wallets you’d create and the addresses underneath them.

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Good to know

• The first wallet you create for a network in a vault becomes that vault’s default wallet, which is the source of funds for external withdrawals.
• Addresses can’t be deleted once generated, because they stay live on the blockchain and can keep receiving deposits.
• Trusted destinations are per network, so the same address on two networks needs two separate entries. See Trusted destinations.
• On some networks, creating one wallet also creates the wallets for every compatible network and archives them to keep your dashboard tidy. Archived wallets still receive deposits, but unarchive them before staking or withdrawing.
• If a deposit lands on a compatible network where you don’t have a wallet yet, we’ll create one for you once the deposit clears spam attribution.
• For what each balance label means, see Reading balances.