importpubkey

importpubkey "pubkey" ( "label" rescan )

Adds a public key (in hex) that can be watched as if it were in your wallet but cannot be used to spend. Requires a new wallet backup.

Hint: use importmulti to import more than one public key.

Note: This call can take over an hour to complete if rescan is true, during that time, other rpc calls may report that the imported pubkey exists but related transactions are still missing, leading to temporarily incorrect/bogus balances and unspent outputs until rescan completes.

Note: Use “getwalletinfo” to query the scanning progress.

Argument #1 - pubkey

Type: string, required

The hex-encoded public key

Argument #2 - label

Type: string, optional, default=””

An optional label

Argument #3 - rescan

Type: boolean, optional, default=true

Rescan the wallet for transactions

Result

null    (json null)

Examples

Import a public key with rescan:

bitcoin-cli importpubkey "mypubkey"

Import using a label without rescan:

bitcoin-cli importpubkey "mypubkey" "testing" false

As a JSON-RPC call:

curl --user myusername --data-binary '{"jsonrpc": "1.0", "id": "curltest", "method": "importpubkey", "params": ["mypubkey", "testing", false]}' -H 'content-type: text/plain;' http://127.0.0.1:8332/