Memo Attribution

Overview

Meaning and scope

Memo attribution is the process of using a blockchain transaction memo and its surrounding evidence to associate an incoming payment with a customer, account, invoice, refund, or business purpose. A memo can contain text, a numeric identifier, a hash, or routing data depending on the network.

Mechanism and operation

Memo Attribution interprets a transaction memo as evidence about the payment’s intended purpose. On Stellar, memos can be text, numeric IDs, hashes, or return hashes, and historically helped pooled accounts route deposits to individual users. The memo must be read from the finalized transaction on the expected network. Memo attribution evaluates what the memo means and which entity it identifies, while memo-based matching uses that validated meaning to select a payment record. The receiving address, asset, amount, and transaction status remain part of the evidence. Memo values should also be namespaced to avoid collisions between invoices, customers, and refunds.

Practical payment example

An exchange assigns a common deposit address and unique memo to each customer. A transfer with the correct address but missing memo enters exception handling instead of being automatically credited.

Operational checks

Systems should retain the raw memo type and bytes as well as any decoded business reference. This preserves auditability when text encoding, normalization, or application rules change later. This evidence can support later Transaction Attribution when the same memo is combined with amount and address data.

Distinctions and limits

User-entered screenshots or wallet notes are not sufficient because they can differ from the field actually submitted on-chain. A correct memo with the wrong destination should not be credited. Case conversion, Unicode normalization, whitespace trimming, or character encoding can change whether two values match.

Related reading

Related definitions: Memo-Based Matching, Transaction Attribution.