Cardano wallet guide: ADA addresses, wallet choices and receiving a swap

What a Cardano wallet does

A Cardano wallet stores the keys that control your ADA; the coins themselves live on the Cardano blockchain. When you create a wallet you get a recovery phrase, usually 15 or 24 words depending on the wallet. Anyone with that phrase controls the funds, so write it down offline and never type it into a website, a support chat or a swap form. A swap service never needs it: to receive ADA you only share an address.

Choosing a wallet

Most people use a light wallet, which connects to the network through a server instead of downloading the whole blockchain. Pick one that is actively maintained, comes from the official site or app store, and supports the hardware wallet you may want later.

• Lace: built by Input Output, the company behind much of Cardano’s development; browser extension with Ledger and Trezor support.
• Yoroi: built by EMURGO; browser extension and mobile app, with Ledger and Trezor support.
• Eternl: built by Tastenkunst GmbH; browser and mobile, with Ledger, Trezor and Keystone support.
• Daedalus: a full-node desktop wallet that downloads and checks the whole chain; slower to set up, no third-party server.
• Hardware wallets: keep the keys on a separate device and approve transactions there; use them through one of the light wallets above.

Cardano addresses: addr1, stake1 and the rest

A normal Cardano receiving address starts with addr1. Most are base addresses, which combine a payment part (who can spend the coins) and a stake part (who earns the staking rewards). Enterprise addresses have only a payment part and are used by some exchanges and services. Reward addresses, also called stake addresses, start with stake1. They collect staking rewards but cannot receive normal payments, so never paste one into a payout field.

• addr1…: use this to receive ADA from a swap or anyone else.
• stake1…: your reward account; it shows rewards, it does not receive payments.
• Your wallet can show many addr1 addresses; they all belong to the same wallet.

The minimum ADA rule and fees

Every output on Cardano must carry a minimum amount of ADA. For an output holding only ADA that is 978,370 lovelace, about 1 ADA (1 ADA is 1,000,000 lovelace). Outputs that also hold native tokens need more. The transaction fee is calculated from the size of the transaction: 44 lovelace per byte plus a fixed 155,381 lovelace, which comes to roughly 0.17 ADA for a simple transfer. In practice this means a wallet cannot always send its very last ADA, and a wallet holding tokens keeps some ADA locked next to them.

Staking and sending

Delegating ADA to a stake pool does not move or lock it. The coins stay in your wallet, you can spend them at any time, and there is no slashing: a badly run pool can cost you rewards, not coins. Registering a stake address takes a refundable 2 ADA deposit. Rewards arrive in your reward account at the end of each epoch, which lasts five days, and you withdraw them to your spendable balance from the wallet. So there is no need to stop staking before a swap; send the ADA as normal.

Receiving ADA from a swap

Open your wallet’s receive screen and copy an addr1 address. Paste it into the payout field and compare the first and last characters before you create the order. Only ADA is paid out; Cardano native tokens are not supported. Cardano produces a block about every 20 seconds, so once the payout is sent your wallet usually shows it within a minute or two.

• XMR → ADA and other routes into Cardano: payout to addr1 only.
• Exchange deposit addresses work if the exchange credits ADA from external senders.

Sending ADA to a swap

Send native ADA on Cardano mainnet to the deposit address on your order, for the exact amount shown, within the 15-minute quote window. Leave a little ADA behind for the fee and the minimum-output rule; your wallet will warn you if the amount cannot be sent. Do not include native tokens in the transaction. ADA → XMR pays Monero to a Monero wallet; ADA → USDT pays Tether on Ethereum, TRON or Solana, because Tether does not issue USDT on Cardano.

Exchange account or your own wallet?

You can receive ADA at an exchange deposit address, but then the exchange holds the coins and decides when you can withdraw them. In your own wallet only you control them, you can stake them, and you can send them whenever you like. If you only need ADA for a moment, for example to swap it onward, an exchange address works as long as it credits ADA from outside senders. If you want to keep it, use your own wallet and back up the recovery phrase before the payout arrives.

How to check that a payout arrived

Your wallet shows an incoming transaction as soon as it is in a block. If it does not appear, copy the payout transaction ID from your order page and look it up in a Cardano block explorer: it shows the receiving address, the amount and the number of confirmations. If the explorer shows the payment at your address but the wallet does not, the wallet is usually still syncing or is showing a different account.

• Compare the address in the explorer with the one you pasted into the order.
• Multi-account wallets show each account separately; check the right one.
• Payouts to an exchange appear in your exchange balance only after the exchange credits them.

Mistakes to avoid

Most Cardano problems come from address types and balances.

• Pasting a stake1 reward address as the payout address.
• Trying to send the whole balance and hitting the minimum-ADA rule.
• Sending native tokens along with ADA to a deposit address that only accepts ADA.
• Installing a wallet from a search ad instead of the official site or app store.
• Typing the recovery phrase anywhere other than the wallet itself.