The same address exists on every EVM chain, and money left on one you have forgotten about is invisible in a wallet that is only showing you the network it happens to be on. Paste an address and this reads the native balance on all of them.
An Ethereum address is not an account that a network creates for you. It is a number derived from your key, and every chain that copied Ethereum's design derives it the same way. That means your address already exists on all of them, before you have ever touched them, and anything sent to it on any of them lands safely under your control.
The problem is entirely one of visibility. Your wallet shows you the network it is currently pointed at. If a withdrawal went out over Arbitrum and your wallet is looking at Ethereum, the balance reads zero and the panic starts, even though nothing went wrong and the money is exactly where it should be.
This is the specific mistake worth naming. Exchanges ask you to pick a network when you withdraw, and the address box does not change when you change that dropdown, because the address is valid on all of them. Choose the cheap network by habit, or leave the default alone, and the funds arrive on a chain you were not expecting. Nothing is lost. It is simply not where you were looking.
The exception, and it is an important one, is sending to an address that is not yours on the other chain. A contract address, or an exchange deposit address, may exist on the destination chain as something entirely different, or as nothing at all. That is the case where funds really can be unrecoverable, and it is why the destination always matters as much as the network.
Add the network in your wallet and the balance appears. From there you can either use it where it is or bridge it back to the chain you actually live on, and the Bridge Route Finder will tell you what that move costs before you commit to it.
One caution. If you find tokens on a chain you never used, be careful with them. Unsolicited tokens are routinely dropped into wallets precisely so the owner will search the name, find a site, and connect. Finding your own coin on a forgotten chain is good news. Finding a token you did not buy is not a windfall.
Because an EVM address is derived from a key, not registered with a network. Every EVM chain uses the same derivation, so the same key produces the same address everywhere. Nobody creates it on each chain, it simply is the address on all of them, whether anything has ever been sent to it there or not.
Yes, and this is the single most common way people lose track of funds. Send to the right address on the wrong network and it arrives safely at an address you control, on a chain your wallet may not even be showing. It is not lost. It is sitting there waiting for you to add the network.
No, only the native coin of each chain, the ETH or BNB or POL that pays the gas. Reading every token on every chain needs an indexer, and this tool deliberately uses only public nodes so it needs no key and no account. The native balance is what tells you a chain is worth looking at, and once you know that, adding the network in your wallet shows you the rest.
An address is public. It is the thing you give people so they can pay you, it is visible in every transaction you have ever made, and every block explorer will show its balance to anybody who asks. Nothing here connects to your wallet and there is nothing to sign. Never paste a seed phrase or a private key anywhere, including here.
Add that network to your wallet and it will appear. Be careful with any token you find there that you did not buy, because unexpected tokens are often placed deliberately to get you to visit a site to claim them.
Public nodes go down or rate limit. It means the read failed, not that the balance is zero, so run it again before drawing a conclusion about that chain.
We seal the list every week and keep re-checking every token on it, so you can see what actually happened to them rather than only what is trading today.
