# Claiming money you've received

> What the Claim state means, what Register and claim does, what it costs, and what still needs doing afterwards.

Sometimes money arrives in your pool balance before your wallet is fully set up with Privacy Pools. The app shows it as **Claim** instead of **Ready**, with a callout that says "Funds received. Register this wallet to spend them." This page explains what that means and what happens when you press Claim.

## Why the money is yours but not spendable yet

Two separate things have to be true before you can spend in the pool. The money has to be found by your device, and your wallet has to be registered onchain. Receiving needs neither. Spending, sending and even the emergency exit need the registration, because every one of those actions proves that the wallet owning the money is on the pool's registry.

So a deposit or transfer made to you before you registered lands fine and sits in your balance as Claim. Nobody else can touch it. You can't move it until you register.

## What "Register and claim" does

The registration is a transaction, and a wallet that has only ever received private money usually has no ETH to pay for one. So the app offers to have a relayer submit it for you. The relayer takes its fee out of the money you're claiming instead of out of your wallet, which also keeps your address off the transaction.

The fee is 0.1% plus a fixed amount that covers gas. Everything left after the fee stays in your shielded balance. Nothing is paid out to your wallet in this step.

The fixed part is negligible on ordinary amounts and painful on tiny ones. On a test amount of a few dollars it can take a large share, so if you're only testing, test with more than pocket change.

If your wallet does have ETH, the app lets you register the ordinary way instead, paying gas yourself. That path takes two transactions and also publishes your viewing key, which matters below.

## Where the claim happens

- **From your balance.** If the money was found by your device on its own, the Claim callout on My Pools opens the registration.
- **From a claim link.** If someone sent to you or deposited for you before you'd registered, they'll have a one-time link to give you. Open it, connect the wallet that owns the address, and press Claim Payment. The link only works with that wallet. Anyone else who opens it sees nothing they can spend.

If you're signed in with an account key instead of a wallet, you can import what a link carries onto this device, but you can't claim it. Registration has to be signed by the owner wallet. Connect that wallet once.

## Claim promptly

Until you claim, you have no way to move the money, including the emergency exit. For a payment received through a payment request there's one more reason: those notes are tied to the request instead of to your address until you claim them, and the emergency exit can't reach them at all in that state. Claiming turns them into ordinary notes that it can.

If the callout says "saved in this tab only", the money was found through a link and hasn't been anchored onchain yet. Closing the tab loses that copy. Claim before you close it, or open the link again later.

## One thing the relayer path doesn't do

The relayer-paid registration makes you spendable but doesn't publish your viewing key. Until you publish it, people paying you still end up with a claim link to hand you, because their app can't find a key to announce the payment to.

Publishing it is a single wallet transaction from the wallet menu, once your wallet has a little ETH. The viewing key page in the app shows whether yours is published. Do it before you ask anyone else to pay you, and see [Depositing to an address that hasn't registered](./deposit-to-unregistered) for what your payers see until then.