Bitcoin Forum

We operate a crypto currency fund and trade all sorts of crypto currencies on various exchanges. I’ve noticed that some wallets eg. Block keeper, Armory, Mycelium facilitate watch-only feature. Using these wallets, can we track the balances and positions on various exchanges (without having the access to them) that we use using the watch-only feature? Can someone share if they had a similar experience or suggest how to resolve this issue?

I have only used this feature in my electrum so I will only talk about it here and don't have idea about that feature on other wallets or services.

Watch only simply mean you can watch balance and all transactions going in and out of particular address in real time without knowing its private key, you just need to put your desired bitcoin address. But you will not be able to send any bitcoin out of that address.

You can see list of cold/hot wallet addresses for different exchanges in https://www.walletexplorer.com/, and if you want to than put those addresses in your watch only wallet to see what those exchange platforms have in their wallets and its daily activity.

I always do this in myetherwallet (MEW) i think this is the safest way to check your online web wallet so far. They do this because there are so many people got scam by some phising sites that copy there websites wallet thats why i always do bookmark the site of my webwallets.

The safety of a well configured watch-only wallet is nearly absolute. This you cannot say about any online wallet, no matter how secure it is. A watch-only wallet doesn't contain your Private key at all. It just contains a sequence of public keys and their corresponding addresses, which are all derived from your private key, and you can monitor your funds without any risk of exposing your private key to anyone.