A handful of cryptocurrencies ask for two things when you send them: an address, and a short code called a memo, destination tag or comment. The address field is obvious. The second field looks optional, is usually unlabelled in any helpful way, and is the reason donations arrive at the right place and are credited to nobody.
If you are donating XRP, Stellar, Toncoin, Cosmos or a handful of others, this is the field that matters most.
What the second field is actually for
Some chains let one address serve many accounts.
An exchange holding XRP for two million customers does not create two million XRP accounts — each one would need its own reserve balance, which would be absurd. Instead it keeps a small number of addresses and distinguishes customers by a number attached to each payment. That number is the destination tag.
Stellar does the same thing with a memo. Toncoin uses a comment field. Cosmos-family chains use a memo. The mechanism differs; the purpose is identical: the address says which building, the memo says which apartment.
Send without it and the payment is valid, final and recorded on-chain. It simply arrives at the building with no apartment number, and the software that credits accounts does not know whose it is.
Which coins need it, and when
The crucial point is that it depends on the recipient, not only the coin.
- A personal wallet you control — almost never needs a memo. There is one account behind the address.
- An exchange or custodial deposit address — almost always needs one. This is where omissions cause real trouble.
- A payment processor's generated address — depends on the processor. Many generate a unique address per payment precisely so no memo is needed; others require one.
Coins where you should expect a memo field: XRP (destination tag), Stellar / XLM (memo), Toncoin / TON (comment), Cosmos / ATOM and related chains (memo), EOS, Hedera / HBAR, and some Algorand flows.
Coins where there is no such concept: Bitcoin, Ethereum and the EVM chains, Litecoin and Dogecoin. Zcash shielded transactions carry an encrypted memo field, and Monero has a deprecated payment-ID mechanism, but donation pages ask for neither. If something asks you for a "memo" when you are sending Bitcoin, stop and look again at what you are using.
The rule that prevents almost all of it
Copy whatever the recipient's page shows, into the field it tells you to use. If it shows no memo, do not invent one.
Both halves matter. A missing memo strands a payment. An incorrect memo is worse, because the payment may be confidently credited to somebody else's account — and at that point the recipient cannot simply hand it back, because it is no longer identifiable as yours.
Some wallets and exchanges show a tick-box reading something like "this address has no memo". Only tick it if the recipient's page actually says so.
What good donation pages do
If you run a charity accepting these coins, this is your problem to prevent:
- Show the memo next to the address, at the same visual weight. A memo in small grey text under a large address will be missed.
- Say explicitly when there is none. "No memo required" removes the guesswork that leads people to leave it blank out of hope.
- Prefer a unique address per payment where your tooling allows it, so the memo is never needed.
- Make it copyable. People retype memos and transpose digits.
Donations to TraceGood go through a checkout that generates the payment details for each gift, and where a memo is required it is displayed with the address. We mention it in our exchange walkthroughs — Kraken, Coinbase and the rest — because the exchange withdrawal screen is exactly where it gets dropped.
If you already sent without one
Do not panic, and do not assume it is gone. Unlike sending on the wrong network, a missing memo is usually a bookkeeping problem rather than a cryptographic one. The funds did arrive. Somebody has them. The question is whether they can work out that they are yours.
- Find the transaction on a block explorer and save the transaction hash.
- Contact the recipient straight away. Send the hash, the exact amount, the asset, the sending address and the approximate time.
- Say plainly that the memo was omitted. That is the information that tells their support team which process to run.
- Expect it to take days, not minutes, and expect to be asked to prove the sending wallet is yours.
- Do not send a second payment "with the memo this time" hoping it clarifies the first. It does not, and now there are two problems.
Recovery is common for large custodians and uncertain for small ones. It is never guaranteed, because what you are asking for is a manual exception.
If it happened donating to us, tell us with the hash and the amount and we will trace it against our records.
The honest summary
This is an unglamorous failure caused by interface design, not by anybody's carelessness. A field that is mandatory for some recipients, meaningless for others, invisible in some wallets and labelled three different things across the industry will be left blank sometimes.
Two habits remove nearly all the risk: copy exactly what the recipient's page shows, and send a small test first when the amount matters.
Every confirmed donation to TraceGood appears on our public ledger with a link to an independent block explorer, so you can check that what you sent is what arrived.
We are a newly founded organisation whose registration as a non-profit association in Estonia is not yet complete, and donations to us are not tax-deductible anywhere. Our About page carries the full position.