Whitelist

Where wallets and crypto exchange addresses are concerned, a Whitelist is a list of wallet addresses that you trust.

Trusting an address means you’re familiar with it.

It might be the case that you own it at another centralized exchange (CEX) or with a 3rd party wallet provider like MetaMask.

Perhaps you’ve also manually confirmed the authenticity of the wallet address and you trust it.

Specific to currency exchanges and security best practices, most exchanges allow you to specify a whitelist of IP addresses that are able to interact with your account.

This interaction could take the form of withdrawals, account logins, API access, placing trades, and many other account security mechanisms.

Only IP addresses on your whitelist will be able to perform the specific action.

Whitelists, in this case, can keep unknown actors from accessing your account and potentially withdrawing your funds without your permission.

Specific to ICOs, a whitelist represents a potential investor who has provided their personal information to the ICO administrators in an effort to participate in the ICO.

Related Terms

Wallet

Made up of a unique public address called your public key (similar to your bank account number) that you can share with the world, your friends, family, and other businesses and companies that you trust, to send and receive digital assets. A wallet also stores a private key (much like the PIN that you use to access your bank account at the ATM), which, when combined with the public key, confirms ownership of the wallet, and allows you as the wallet owner to view the digital record of your wallet transactions, and allows you to perform actions such as buying, selling, withdrawing, and swapping funds.

Initial Coin Offering (ICO)

A token sale or crowdfunding event offered by cryptocurrency startups, existing projects, and blockchains, looking to raise money from investors to fund new and ongoing development. It’s very similar to initial public offerings (IPO) that take place in the traditional finance world of stocks. ICOs sometimes offer pre-sale or discounted token prices in exchange for capital investment.

Wallet Address

A unique string of letters and numbers that represents a wallet, exchange, or blockchain address. This identifier (unique from every other address on the planet) serves as the virtual street address for the specific currency on that currency’s blockchain.

Desktop Wallet

A common type of crypto wallet used to securely store and manage your private keys on a computer hard drive. They’re considered more secure than web-based wallets, since you can only access them from wherever your computer is located, and again, you control your private keys.

Geoblock

Geoblocks implemented by crypto services like cryptocurrency exchanges usually block the IP addresses of large collections of users from connecting to their websites or mobile applications. These blocks are accomplished by comparing a user’s IP address to a list of allowed and not allowed IP addresses. IP addresses identify a person’s location in the world, and crypto services can use that information to block specific locations by country, region, state, city, or even just an individual IP address.