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What is a wallet address?
A wallet address is a string of letters and numbers that identifies an account on a blockchain, the place others send funds to. On Ethereum it is 42 characters beginning with 0x, taken from the hash of the account's public key.
What it means for you
A payment sent to a wrong address, or to an address on a different chain, generally cannot be recalled. Compare the full address, not just the first and last few characters, because scammers create look-alike addresses. Everyone can see every payment made to a given address.
A common mistake: “If my wallet accepts the address, it must be the right one.”
In fact: A checksum only catches typing mistakes. A look-alike address planted in your history or clipboard is a valid address, so it passes; only comparing the full address against where it came from catches the swap.
How it works
An Ethereum address is the last 20 bytes of the Keccak-256 hash of a public key, shown as 40 hex characters after 0x. Under EIP-55, wallets capitalize some letters according to a hash of the address, so a randomly mistyped address passes the check only about 0.0247% of the time. A classic Bitcoin address encodes a public-key hash with a version number and an error-detecting checksum. A checksum catches typing mistakes, not substitution: an address planted by a scammer is a real address and passes every check.
Sources: ethereum.org: Ethereum accounts, EIP-55: Mixed-case checksum address encoding, Bitcoin developer guide: Transactions · checked 4 October 2026
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