The kinds
A wallet connects the same way whether a payment is involved or not, so you can adopt it with no transfer attached. A linked exchange account is a standalone connection and does not fund a Flow payment. An exchange purchase and a deposit address exist only as the source of a payment. Payment sources compares the sources a payer can pay from.
Wallets
A wallet the user already owns: MetaMask, Phantom, Rainbow, a Ledger. These are externally owned accounts, and they differ from embedded wallets, which Dynamic creates and the user does not have to install. There are two routes to connecting one. The choice is about where the wallet UI lives rather than what the user ends up with:
You can use both. Native in your main app, hosted where building a picker is not worth it or where you cannot add an SDK.
Supported wallets lists which wallets work on which chains, and the standards behind them.
Exchange accounts
The user authorises an exchange account rather than a wallet. That authorisation lets you read balances and send a direct withdrawal, with no on-chain wallet involved. A linked exchange account does not fund a Flow payment. A payer who wants to pay from an exchange uses an exchange purchase link instead, which needs no linked account. See Exchange connections for which exchanges, how authorisation works, and what you can do once an account is connected.Deposit addresses
The one option that connects nothing. A unique address is generated for each payment, and the user sends funds to it. That suits a payer coming from a centralised exchange, a cold wallet, or any context where connecting is impractical. The inbound transfer is detected automatically. Show the address as a QR code, or let the user copy it. Because nothing is connected and nothing is signed in your app, a deposit-address payment skips the signing steps of the payment lifecycle. Supported on BTC, SOL, EVM, and TRON.Choosing
For a Flow payment, the payment source is chosen per payment rather than per product, so you can offer several and let the payer pick. The practical split: a wallet when your payers are crypto-native and arrive with a wallet, an exchange when they keep funds on an exchange such as Coinbase, and a deposit address as the fallback that works from anywhere without asking anyone to connect. Payment sources covers the choice in detail.Next
Conversion
What happens when the connected source holds something other than what you settle in.
Payment sources
What a payer can pay from in a Flow payment, and which sources are screened.