Watch-only wallet

A watch-only wallet is created by importing an address or the extended public key (xpub) of a hierarchical deterministic wallet. The xpub lets you derive child addresses and therefore see every balance and the full history of the set, but it cannot spend. In hardware setups such as Ledger, Trezor or BitBox02, the desktop app displays balances while signing stays confined to the offline device, keeping the private key isolated.

Keep one privacy nuance in mind: exporting an xpub exposes all derived addresses and the complete transaction history of that account. It is a trade-off of visibility, not of fund control, because whoever watches never gains signing capability. That separation between the role of viewing and the role of signing is precisely what makes this kind of wallet useful.

It lets you monitor balances and movements without exposing the private key to the monitoring device, with zero theft risk from the view itself. Its natural use cases are auditing (verifying reserves or holdings), accounting (reconciling movements) and treasury monitoring. BlueWallet offers a watch-only feature by address or xpub; Blockstream (Green and Jade), BitBox02 and Vault12 Guard document the setup via xpub export, and Sparrow or Electrum support importing an xpub or descriptors.