What is a memo or destination tag and when do I have to include one

07 September 2026

A memo (sometimes called a destination tag) is a short string of numbers or letters that tells the receiving exchange which account the incoming coins belong to. You must include it whenever the exchange or wallet you are sending to explicitly asks for one, and failing to do so can mean your funds sit in limbo until support staff untangle them.

The reason it exists is that many exchanges and custodial wallets use one single blockchain address for all of their customers. Your coins do not arrive in a private mailbox; they land in a shared lobby. The memo is the room number. Without it, the exchange knows coins arrived, but not whose they are. Some services will credit the funds automatically if they can guess, but most will not, and you will be filing a support ticket.

You will most often see this requirement on networks like Ripple (XRP), Stellar (XLM), EOS, and some others that were designed with a "memo" field baked into the transaction. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most other major networks do not use memos for normal transfers. The rule is simple: look at the withdrawal screen on the sending side. If it shows a field labelled "memo", "destination tag", "tag", or "note", then you must fill it in with exactly what the receiving side gave you. If the receiving side gave you a memo, copy it character for character. Do not invent one. Do not reuse an old one.

The confusion usually starts with exchanges that generate a new deposit address each time. That is a different system, and it is covered in the sibling page about why your deposit address looks different each time. Here, we are talking about the case where the exchange gives you a fixed address and a separate memo. You need both. Sending to the address without the memo is like mailing a letter to an apartment building with no apartment number. The building gets it, but nobody knows which door to knock on.

There is a second, less common case: when you are sending from an exchange that uses memos internally. Some exchanges will ask you to include a memo when you withdraw, even if the destination network does not use them. That memo is for the sending exchange's internal records, not for the receiving wallet. If the destination field does not ask for one, leave it blank. Do not paste a random memo into a Bitcoin or Ethereum transaction; it will not go anywhere useful.

What happens if you forget the memo? The transaction will still confirm on the blockchain. The exchange will see the coins arrive at their shared address. Then they will sit there, unassigned. Most exchanges have a process for this, but it is manual. You will need to provide proof of the transaction, sometimes a video of your screen, and wait. It can take days. It is not a disaster, but it is a delay you can avoid by reading the screen twice before you hit send.

One more thing worth knowing: memos are not secret. They are not like a private key or a password. Anyone who knows the memo and the deposit address could theoretically send funds to your account, but they could not withdraw them. Treat the memo as an identifier, not a credential. Do not share it publicly, but do not panic if it appears in a transaction history.

If you are unsure whether a network uses memos, check the withdrawal page on the sending side. It will either show the field or it will not. When it does, the receiving exchange will have displayed the exact value you need. Copy it, paste it, double-check it. That is the whole job.

For the broader picture of what happens to your coins between the moment you send them and the moment the swap completes, the hub page under which this sits - "What a swap actually does with your coins" - is the next thing to read. The memo is just one small checkpoint in that journey. Get it right, and the rest of the process moves along without you having to think about it.

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