Check any balance yourself

Everything else here rests on one thing you can do yourself. You can look up any address, on whatever site you choose, without asking anyone. It takes about thirty seconds.

A block explorer is a website that reads the chain and shows you what's there. Paste in an address. You'll see what it holds, and every transaction it has ever made.

Each network has several, run by different people. They should all show you the same thing. If two of them disagree about an address, one of them is wrong. Better to find that out before you act on either.

Use one whenever someone shows you a number. A screenshot proves nothing. Screenshots are easy to edit, and a wallet screen can be made to show anything at all. Ask for the address instead. Look it up yourself, and you've seen it rather than been told it.

That includes us. If Aureus shows you a balance, you can paste that address into an explorer and see the same number. We'd like you to — that's how you know.

An explorer shows you one network. An address can hold things on several networks at once. An explorer for one of them tells you nothing about the others.

So “I looked and there's nothing there” is not the same as “there's nothing there”.

Aureus has the same limit, and says so on every read. We read Bitcoin and Ethereum. We tell you which networks we didn't read. Two of them — Monero and Zcash — can't be read from an address by anyone.

Half a picture is fine, as long as someone tells you it's half. It stops being honest when they call it the whole thing.