Address Book Features Compared

Copying an address from your transaction history is how address poisoning works. An address book removes the behaviour entirely.

The attack it defeats

An attacker sends you a worthless transaction from an address whose first and last characters match one you use regularly.

Weeks later you want to send to your usual destination, scroll your history, find what looks right, copy it, and send to the attacker.

Nothing about your wallet was compromised. Your own history was made unreliable.

What an address book provides

A saved entry with a label you chose, selected from a list rather than copied from anywhere.

The entry cannot be modified by an incoming transaction, which closes the attack completely.

What we compare

Whether the feature exists at all. Several wallets do not have one.

Labels. Free text rather than truncated addresses.

Network association. Whether an entry records which network it belongs to. Without that, the address book solves the poisoning problem and not the wrong-network problem.

Verification prompts. Whether adding an entry prompts you to verify it, which is the moment when checking is most useful.

Sync behaviour. Whether entries are stored locally or synchronised to a service. Synchronised entries are convenient and reveal your destinations to whoever runs the service.

Editing warnings. Whether changing a saved address warns clearly, since a modified entry would defeat the purpose.

The venue equivalent

Exchanges implement this as a withdrawal address allowlist, frequently with a delay before a newly added address becomes usable.

That is the address book plus a security property, and it is the single most effective account setting available. It is off by default everywhere we have looked, including on platforms that implement it well such as venues supporting external addresses.

The habit

Save every destination you use more than once, with a label, at the moment you first verify it carefully.

From then on, select rather than copy. It takes the address verification burden from every transaction down to the first one.

What it does not cover

A destination you use once. There the test transaction is the defence: send a small amount, confirm arrival, then send the rest.

Between an address book for repeat destinations and a test transaction for new ones, the entire category of address error is covered.