DFNS now supports Address Watches. Register any onchain address, one you do not control, and DFNS treats it the way it treats your own wallets: indexed in real time, with history, balances, and webhooks the moment anything touches it. A watch is a registration on an address, and nothing else.
Why it’s not a wallet
The industry has a long habit of calling this a watch-only or read-only wallet, and the phrase usually hides a key somewhere (e.g., an extended public key in a Bitcoin wallet, a private view key in Monero, always some cryptographic material that ties the object to funds you own). An Address Watch has none of that, and it frequently observes an address that belongs to someone else entirely. So we did not call it a wallet, and we did not build it as one.
An Address Watch is a separate entity in the platform, with its own identifier, its own permissions, and its own endpoints. The transfer, signing, and key export endpoints do not exist for it. There is no code path by which a watch could ever move funds, because nothing on the platform can sign for an address it holds no key for. For institutions asking their infrastructure to prove it cannot do something, that is the strongest answer available.
Why institutions need to watch addresses they don’t own
The driver is a pattern that shows up wherever finance moves onto shared ledgers:
- An institution has to react to activity on an account it does not control.
- A network operator’s smart contract records an acceptance, a liability, a settlement, and every participant’s systems must respond the moment it happens.
- A counterparty’s settlement address receives funds you are owed.
- A market infrastructure’s contract emits the event your back office has been waiting for.
Until now, reacting to them meant running your own indexing, polling nodes, decoding logs, and maintaining that machinery for every network involved. An Address Watch gives the DFNS indexer one more address to know, and gives you the same webhook you already consume for your own wallets, for an address that belongs to someone else.
The second use is to observe an address you care about, an exchange deposit address, a client’s self-custodied wallet, a treasury account held elsewhere, and keep a complete, real-time picture of it alongside your own estate without the address becoming a liability on your books.
What you get
Every Address Watch carries the same operational surface as a wallet, minus anything that moves funds.
A history of every value transfer touching the address, native and token, from the moment the watch is created. A balance view across the address’s assets. And decoded smart contract events: for supported contracts, DFNS surfaces the event name and its decoded fields, so a settlement recorded onchain arrives in your systems as structured data, not a log you have to parse.
Each of these has its own webhook, additive to the ones you already use, so existing subscribers are untouched: a blockchain event detected on a watched address, a contract event confirmed on a watched address, and a balance updated on a watched address. Payloads carry an Address Watch ID where wallet payloads carry a walletId; everything else is the shape your integration already understands.
Several organizations can watch the same address. Each gets its own history, its own balances, and its own webhooks, routed to it alone. A watch begins at creation and looks forward: it indexes new activity, not the address’s past. And archiving a watch stops everything, immediately, so an address you no longer care about goes quiet the moment you say so.
The surface is deliberately small: create, get, list, archive, history, assets, and blockchain events, guarded by their own permissions, separate from wallet permissions, so observation can be granted to people and systems that should never hold a wallet permission at all.
Networks
Address Watches launch on Ethereum, its testnets, and Besu-based private EVMs. Each additional network is enabled as an explicit decision once its indexing path supports watches, one at a time, so a watch on a supported network always fires and a watch on an unsupported one is never silently accepted. More networks follow.
Get started
- Learn more about onchain core banking: dfns.co
- Explore the platform and documentation: docs.dfns.co
- Talk to our team: sales@dfns.co