Watch-Only Wallet

A watch-only wallet contains public keys or extended public keys but no private keys. It can show you balances, track incoming transactions, generate receive addresses, and build unsigned transactions - but it can't actually sign or spend.

The standard pattern: a hardware wallet holds the private keys, and you load its xpub (extended public key) into a watch-only wallet on your laptop or phone. The watch-only wallet derives every address you'll ever use from that xpub, monitors them on-chain, and shows you the wallet state in real time. When you want to send, the watch-only wallet builds a PSBT and hands it to the hardware wallet to sign.

Why this split is useful:

• Daily monitoring without exposure. Your phone shows your wallet balance without your keys ever being on your phone.
• Auditing. Accountants, business partners, or auditors can verify on-chain activity for a wallet without needing spending access.
• Multisig coordination. Each cosigner can keep a watch-only view of the shared wallet while their actual keys live on isolated hardware.
• Backup verification. Restore an xpub on a different machine to confirm your addresses match - sanity-checking your backup without exposing your seed.

Watch-only wallets are widely supported. Sparrow, Electrum, Bitcoin Core, Specter Desktop, Nunchuk, BlueWallet, and others all handle xpubs natively. Modern self-custody workflows almost always pair a hardware wallet with a watch-only desktop or mobile companion - it's the cleanest separation between "knowing your balance" and "having the keys."

See Hardware Wallet for the signing-side device and PSBT for how watch-only and signing wallets actually exchange transactions.