Wallets and the two addresses
The single most useful thing to understand before you spend anything: your wallet almost certainly has two Bitcoin addresses, and they do different jobs.
One wallet, two addresses
Section titled “One wallet, two addresses”An Ordinals wallet keeps a payment address for spendable bitcoin and a Taproot Ordinals address for inscriptions, Runes and token balances. Inscribe reads both, keeps them apart, and signs each action from the address that actually holds what it moves.
The bitcoin balance card reports the payment address on its own. Satoshis sitting at an Ordinals address are carrying assets and are not spendable from there, so adding the two figures together would tell you that you can spend money you cannot.
There is one rule the product holds itself to, and it is worth knowing as a reader:
Payment addresses fund orders. Destination and recipient addresses receive assets. A wallet adapter must not silently substitute one for the other.
Which address does what
Section titled “Which address does what”| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Which address pays for an order? | The payment address |
| Which address receives the inscription? | The Ordinals address, or whatever destination you name |
| Which address pays a network fee? | The payment address, funded only from screened plain-bitcoin outputs |
| Which address signs a transfer of an inscription? | The one holding it, which is the Ordinals address |
| Which balance is “my bitcoin”? | The payment address balance |
Supported wallets
Section titled “Supported wallets”Inscribe connects to five wallets. All five are production integrations.
| Wallet | What it covers | Address model |
|---|---|---|
| Universe | The Bitcoin Universe wallet | Payment and Ordinals addresses |
| UniSat | Ordinals, BRC-20, Runes | Payment and Taproot addresses |
| Xverse | Ordinals, Stamps, Runes | Payment and Ordinals addresses, declared explicitly |
| OKX | Multi-chain | Payment and Ordinals where the provider exposes them |
| Wizz | Bitcoin, Ordinals, Atomicals and Runes | One active address, see below |
Two limitations are worth reading before you pick one:
- Wizz exposes a single active address. Inscribe does not invent a second one to fill the gap, so a flow that genuinely needs two distinct addresses behaves differently here. Mobile support varies by Wizz version, and an optional operation the installed version does not support fails rather than silently doing something else.
- UniSat sessions are not revived from memory. If the extension cannot confirm a live active account, Inscribe drops the session rather than trusting a stored address. You reconnect; you never act against an address the wallet has not just confirmed.
If Universe Wallet is not installed, its install action and the /wallet shortcut open
the reviewed browser-store listing.
The wallet chooser keeps network, retry and diagnostic controls under Connection options, so the first choice stays focused on picking a wallet.
How Inscribe tells the two apart
Section titled “How Inscribe tells the two apart”By address form. A Taproot address, one starting bc1p on mainnet, is treated as the
Ordinals address, because that is where inscriptions live. When a wallet exposes only one
address, that address is used for both jobs, and Inscribe does not pretend otherwise.
When it looks up what you hold, it checks Taproot addresses first for the same reason.
You do not need a wallet to look
Section titled “You do not need a wallet to look”Connecting is required only for actions needing a signature. Without a wallet you can:
- browse every workspace and read live protocol data;
- price an action in full, including the fee tiers;
- paste any address into Explore and see everything it holds;
- track addresses in Watchlist without connecting them.
What Inscribe cannot control
Section titled “What Inscribe cannot control”When you send bitcoin from your wallet’s own send screen, your wallet chooses which outputs to spend, not Inscribe. Inscribe warns where it can see a risk, but it cannot change that selection. Read asset safety for what that warning says and when it appears.