Manage counterparty addresses safely

When you would do this

When a supplier emails to say their payment details have changed. This is the most common fraud scenario in business payments, and how you handle it matters more than almost anything else in this help centre.

The rule: addresses are added, never edited

You cannot edit a saved wallet address. You can change its label, and nothing else.

If a counterparty changes their address, you add the new one and archive the old one. There is no path that quietly rewrites an existing address in place.

This is deliberate. If addresses were editable, one compromised email account plus one careless edit would redirect every future payment to that counterparty, with nothing in the record showing what changed.

Steps: a counterparty changes their address

1. Do not act on the email. Treat any request to change payment details as suspect by default, however routine it looks.
2. Verify out of band. Phone a number you already have on file, not one from the email. Speak to a person you know. Confirm the full address with them.
3. Open the counterparty in Governance › Counterparty.
4. Select Add Address, choose the chain, paste the new address, and label it clearly with the date.
5. Archive the old address so nobody pays it by habit.
6. Send a small test payment, confirm receipt with the counterparty, then resume normal payments.

Archiving

Archiving an address removes it from the pickers so it cannot be selected for a new payment. It does not delete anything: the address and every payment made to it remain in the audit trail.

You can restore an archived address if you archived it in error. Archived addresses are shown as a count on the counterparty record.

You can also archive an entire counterparty, and restore it later.

What to expect

If a counterparty record shows Address Change Locked, one or more of its addresses have pending changes that stay locked until verification is complete. You cannot pay a locked address until that clears.

A newly added address is new until a payment to it completes, at which point it becomes known. A new address above your new-recipient threshold raises a flag on first payment.

Common problems and what they mean

You cannot find an edit button for the address. There is not one. Add and archive instead.

The old address is still being used in a batch. Payee batches hold their own member list. Update the batch as well as the counterparty.

You archived the wrong address. Restore it from the counterparty record.

A payment to a newly added address is flagged. Expected. Resolve the flag with the verification you did. See "Resolve a flagged payment".