When a Cardano address is entered for payment, Daedalus identifies it as a valid address immediately. Even if there is a single character change, it shows it as an invalid address. Were are these addresses stored and how it is identified as a valid address.
1 Answers
There are two verification mechanisms, giving a certain level of certainty it's a valid address.
First, the wallet software can check it's valid address discrimination: Cardano Shelley mainnet addresses start with addr...
Second, the address - being a bech32 encoded string - has a checksum. This checksum for the given string length is not fully bulletproof but in almost all cases allows an instant offline validation for the given address.
Related