Use a quarantine address

When you would do this

Use a quarantine address when you are receiving from someone you do not know well, from a counterparty you have not screened, or in any situation where you would rather inspect the funds before they touch your main balances.

A quarantine address is a separate receiving address you hand out instead of your treasury address. Funds arrive there, you review them, and only then do you move them in. If the sender turns out to be a problem, the problem is contained in an address you can archive rather than sitting in your operating vault.

It also protects against address poisoning, where an attacker seeds your transaction history with an address that looks like one of yours in the hope that someone later copies the wrong one.

Steps: create one

1. Go to Operation › Receive, or to Governance › Vaults.
2. Select New Quarantine Address.
3. Give it a label that identifies who it is for.
4. Share that address with the sender instead of your treasury address.

Steps: review and move the funds in

1. When funds arrive, open the quarantine address and check what landed: asset, amount, network, and the risk result on the deposit.
2. If you are satisfied, use Internal Transfer to move the funds to your main vault.
3. If you are not, leave them where they are and speak to your account manager before moving anything.

Steps: archive it

1. Open the quarantine address and select Archive.
2. If it still holds assets, the dialog tells you so and lists what needs moving. Transfer the funds to your main vault first.
3. Once there are no balances left, confirm Archive Address.

Archiving hides the address from your activity views. It does not delete anything. The address and everything that happened at it remain in the audit trail.

What to expect

Quarantine addresses are counted separately on the Vaults page so you can see how many are open.

They are ordinary addresses in every other respect. Deposits into them are screened like any other deposit, and appear in your ledger.

Common problems and what they mean

"This address holds assets." You cannot archive an address with a balance. Move the funds out first.

"No balances found." Nothing arrived, or it arrived on a different network from the one you are looking at.

You gave out a quarantine address and then archived it. Funds sent to it afterwards still arrive. Archiving hides the address from your views, it does not close it. Tell the sender to stop using it, and archive an address only once you are sure nothing further is coming.