One-Time Payment Address

Overview

Mechanism and important distinctions

A payment service can derive a new deposit address for each invoice from a wallet architecture that preserves the corresponding spending capability. With an extended public key, some wallet designs can derive receive addresses without exposing private signing keys to the web server. The server still needs durable mapping between invoice IDs and address derivation indexes, plus a reliable way to monitor deposits across all issued addresses.

Address uniqueness helps attribution but creates reconciliation and operational tasks. Funds may be scattered across many outputs or addresses, creating future sweep costs. A customer might pay an old invoice address after its deadline or reuse it from an address book. Wallet recovery must reproduce every address previously issued, including indexes beyond a default discovery gap, or otherwise recover the mapping from a protected backup.

A practical merchant dashboard should show the status of every issued address, including unused, partially credited, paid, expired and unexpectedly reused assignments. Reconciliation needs a record of the exact chain and token contract monitored per address. If a payment gateway changes its wallet infrastructure, the historical address mappings must survive migration so later inbound funds are still attributed correctly.

Related glossary concepts

Payment Address Checksum; Pay Currency; Payment Address Normalization