On most blockchains, any token can land in any account, and there is no native way to refuse it or get it back. Receive policies on Tempo let exchanges, custodians, and payment platforms decide which tokens and senders their accounts accept, and recover anything they don’t.
Businesses that receive stablecoins at scale, including exchanges, custodians, on and off ramps, payment processors, and treasury systems manage a constant stream of inbound transfers. On a general-purpose blockchain, an account accepts whatever is sent to it. There is no clear way to validate beforehand which tokens will be sent or who is sending them, resulting in a number of problems:
- A token lands in a deposit address on a blockchain the platform doesn’t support
- A regulated account has no native control over which counterparties can fund it
- Scam tokens can be sent by any malicious user to try drain an address’ funds
Each of these cases becomes a reconciliation exception, a support ticket, or in the worst case, a deposit no one can recover.
How receive policies work
An account configures three things: the tokens it accepts, the senders it accepts, and the recovery authority that can reclaim a transfer the account does not accept. Controls are opt-in and set per account. A sender does not need to know the policy exists: they start a normal transfer, and the policy decides what happens on receipt.
The important part is what happens to a transfer the account does not accept. It is not bounced and it is not lost. It succeeds at the protocol level, the funds route to a protocol guard with a receipt, and they stay recoverable by the authority the account named in advance. For operations teams, a blocked transfer becomes a recovery workflow instead of a lost-funds incident.
What this enables
- Deposit addresses that accept only supported assets, with fewer reconciliation exceptions.
- A protocol-native control over inbound transfers for compliance and operations teams, rather than screening that runs only after funds arrive.
- Account controls that embedded-wallet and wallet-as-a-service providers can expose to their own customers.
- Held transfers that support teams can surface for recovery instead of opening a ticket for every mismatch.
Get started with receive policies
If you receive stablecoins at scale and want native control over what your accounts accept, get in touch. Our team works with exchanges, custodians, and payment platforms to put account controls into production.
