Safety fundamentals

Most Atomicals losses are not exploits. They are ordinary Bitcoin transactions that spent a coloured output the way an ordinary wallet would.

Never do these

• Never give a seed phrase, private key, or wallet export file to anything, including us. No legitimate verification needs them.
• Never let a general purpose Bitcoin wallet choose fee inputs from a set that includes your coloured outputs.
• Never treat a ticker, image, name, or marketplace listing as proof of who made something.
• Never treat one indexer response as final truth. It is one version’s opinion at one moment.

The eight checks before you sign

1. Which outputs are coloured? Identify the exact outpoints carrying the asset. If your wallet cannot tell you, stop.
2. What is the input order? Allocation walks inputs and outputs in order. Order changes the result.
3. What is each output worth in satoshis? Not in token units. In satoshis.
4. What is the output order? Output zero is special for mints and for most transfer shapes.
5. How much lands where? Every output should have an expected unit figure before you sign.
6. What burns? If any value cannot be placed, it is destroyed. It should be zero unless you intended otherwise.
7. Where does the fee come from? A separate cardinal input, never the coloured one.
8. What does the wallet prompt actually say? Compare it to your expectation, line by line.

The single most expensive mistake

Sending a coloured output to an exchange deposit address, a plain Bitcoin wallet, or any service that does not understand Atomicals means the value is spent as ordinary bitcoin. The units are gone. There is no recovery path.

What a burn looks like

How coloured value is destroyed. A coloured input of 1200 satoshis is spent. Output zero is 700 satoshis and receives 700 units. The next eligible output is 546 satoshis, which is larger than the 500 units still to place, so it receives nothing and those 500 units are recorded as burned. The Bitcoin transaction is valid and confirms. Making output one 500 satoshis instead would have placed all the value cleanly.

How coloured value is destroyed

A coloured input of 1200 satoshis is spent. Output zero is 700 satoshis and receives 700 units. The next eligible output is 546 satoshis, which is larger than the 500 units still to place, so it receives nothing and those 500 units are recorded as burned. The Bitcoin transaction is valid and confirms. Making output one 500 satoshis instead would have placed all the value cleanly.

A burn is not an error. The Bitcoin transaction is valid, mined, and confirmed. The units simply have nowhere to go, so the validator records them as destroyed. Read burns for the exact rule and avoid burns for the working procedure.

Four claims that prove nothing

Claim	What it actually proves
The ticker matches	A name was allocated to some Atomical. Nothing about who.
The metadata says so	Someone wrote arbitrary data into a payload.
It is listed on a marketplace	Someone submitted a listing. Ownership is checked separately, at settlement.
The indexer shows a balance	One implementation, at one generation, believes that. Check the version and freshness.

After you broadcast

1. Wait for confirmation on Bitcoin.
2. Wait for the index to reach that height and report a stable generation.
3. Re-read the asset’s location and confirm it matches the output you intended.
4. Check the transaction for recorded burns.

Confirmation and indexing are two separate answers. See confirmations and reorgs.

If something already went wrong

• A transaction that was rejected before broadcast is recoverable: recover from a rejection.
• A wallet that will not sign is usually a capability or encoding problem: wallet signing failures.
• A balance that reads zero is often an unavailable index, not a loss: unavailable index against empty balance.
• A confirmed burn cannot be reversed. Nothing on this site can change that.