Money / Pair 16 of 41
The address expired, or it was never issued to you
The deposit page hands you a string. Later, in another tab or in a message from somebody helpful, a second string turns up looking every bit as legitimate. Only one of them was ever attached to your account.
One string, two histories
Addresses carry no label. A deposit address is a long run of characters with no visible owner, no expiry stamped into it, and nothing in the format that says who is watching it. Two of them side by side look equally plausible and always will.
So the failure reads the same either way. You paid, the chain accepted the payment, and the account never moved. The screen has no idea which of the two happened and never will, since a market watches only the addresses it currently associates with you.
Issued to you, then rotated away
The market gave you this one and it was genuinely yours. Then the session ended or the address rotated, and the ledger stopped tying it to your account. Coin sent there sits at a destination the operator controls, which is a very different position from the alternative.
Issued by somebody, but not to you
This string reached you from somewhere other than your own account page. A forum post, an old screenshot, a mirror you were not sure about, a message from an account claiming to speak for support. Whoever controls it holds the coin, and no operator can undo that.
The gap between those two is enormous and none of it shows on screen. One is a matter of asking a person to look at a record. The other is not a matter of asking anybody anything.
There is a near miss in the middle that catches people out. Some markets issue one long-lived address per account and separate deposits by a reference or memo attached to the payment rather than by the address itself. On that arrangement the address never expires and reusing it is fine, while leaving the reference off produces exactly the same silence as a wrong address would. If your deposit page ever showed you something to include alongside the amount, that is where to look first.
The other near miss is a correct address for the wrong coin. Formats overlap more than people expect, and a market that accepts several coins will show a different string for each. Paying the right account with the wrong asset is neither of the two halves above and needs its own conversation.
Who issued this and to whom
All of it turns on provenance. The chain will confirm that coin arrived somewhere. It will not tell you whose somewhere. The only party holding a record of which strings were handed to your account is the market, and that record lives inside the account rather than in your notes.
Search your own deposit record for the string
Sign in and look for the exact address you paid in your own list of issued deposit addresses. Presence or absence in that list is the answer, and nothing else in the string is.
- Open the deposit section of your own account, reached the way you normally reach it.
- Find the history of addresses the account has been issued, if the market keeps one.
- Search that history for the first six and the last six characters of the string you paid.
- An entry with a timestamp means the address was yours at some point.
- Nothing matching means it was never issued to you, whatever it looked like.
Where no address history is kept, fall back on where the string came from. One copied off the deposit page while signed in is yours. One that arrived by any other route is not, and confidence about it counts for nothing. Take a look at the addresses this site lists before trusting a page that issued you anything.
The costlier direction
- If you treat an expired address as one that was never yours
- You write off money an operator can still see. Coin at an address the market issued sits on their side of the fence, and a stale association is exactly the sort of thing a person can reattach. Saying nothing guarantees nobody looks.
- If you treat a stranger address as your own expired one
- You spend days asking a market to credit a payment they never received and cannot see. Worse, you keep trusting whatever handed you the string, which means the same thing happens again later with a larger amount.
The second is the expensive direction, and not only for the sum already gone. A bad address rarely arrives alone. Whatever produced it is still open, still convincing, and still pointed at you. Shutting that route down is worth more than the deposit it took.
What to do from here
- If the address expired
- Ask once, with the transaction id and the address, and let them look it up. Keep it factual. Do not send a second payment to the new address in the hope of nudging the first one along, since that only adds a second thing to reconcile.
- If it was never yours
- Treat the money as gone and turn your attention to the route. Work out which page, message or saved note produced the string and stop using it. Then take a fresh address from the deposit page while signed in.
Questions readers send about this pair
Do deposit addresses expire on a fixed timer?
That varies by market and by coin, and nothing here can tell you what a given operator does. The practical point stands anyway: an address issued in one session may not be watched for your account in the next, so taking a fresh one each time removes the question entirely.
I saved an address that worked last time. Is it still mine?
It might be. It might also have rotated to another account or simply stopped being watched. A string that worked once carries no promise about the second time, and there is nothing in the characters that would tell you either way.
Can I tell from the address itself which market it belongs to?
No. An address encodes a key and a format and nothing about its owner. Two addresses can look equally ordinary and belong to entirely different people, which is the whole reason this pair exists.