What are Claimable balances and how can I claim a Pending payment on LOBSTR?

A standard payment on the Stellar Network requires the recipient of the transaction to create a trustline for the asset you’re sending. When a standard payment is made, but no trustline is set up, the sender will receive an error as the network won’t allow them to send the payment.

Claimable balances on Stellar help avoid such issues – somebody can send you a payment of an asset you don’t hold a trustline for, and you can decide if you would like to accept it or not.

Claimable balances sent to your Stellar account are referred to as pending payments in the LOBSTR wallet. 

Pending payments can be sent by anyone on the network. They are entirely safe to claim, but users can choose to ignore them if they wish. The account cannot be hacked by receiving or accepting pending payments.

LOBSTR doesn't distribute the tokens, they are sent from other users on the Stellar network. These users may attach time limits to the payments, like claiming before, during, or after a certain time so it's worth checking a payment as soon as one arrives.

There are several different statuses that a claimable balance can have on LOBSTR according to the time limits set by the sender:

- Expired payments can no longer be claimed by your account. You are free to hide those from your list of payments.

- Pending (or active) payments can be claimed at the current time and will be credited to your balance once claimed. Make sure to review the conditions and claim until the payment expires.

- Upcoming payments will be available to claim in the future once the claim conditions set by the sender are met. You can set a reminder to be notified when you can claim an upcoming payment. 

How to claim Pending payments on LOBSTR?

- You can follow an in-app 'View pending payments' notification within your LOBSTR wallet.

Just click the 'View pending payments' button to see which claimable balances have been sent to your wallet.

- You can also view and accept pending payments by heading to 'Transactions' in the side menu.

The number of payments that are ready to be accepted will be displayed here:

1. Tap 'Pending';

Here you can view all pending payments attached to your account, including ones that are active, upcoming, or expired.

2. Select the pending payment you wish to claim. On the 'Details' screen, you can check the Claim conditions and Estimated value of the token.

Always check the payment for time restraints. Some distributors may burn tokens when not claimed, or they may leave them always available for redemption. 

3. Click 'Claim';

That's it. The payment has been accepted and the claimable balance should be received into your wallet.

The trustline for an asset will be created automatically when claiming the token.

Note: Before claiming the payment, ensure your Stellar wallet is active (the absolute min balance is 1 XLM) and has enough XLM to establish a trustline for an asset you're going to claim.

Each asset trustline requires an additional 0.5 XLM reserve (enforced by the Stellar network, not LOBSTR). Learn more

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Useful tips

If you have an Upcoming pending payment that should be claimed within a certain period of time and don’t want to miss the moment when you can accept it, you can receive a reminder when the payment will be available to claim by selecting the relevant payment and switching on 'Remind me to claim'.

Just in case you wish to remove some pending payments from the list, go ahead and click on the payment, then tap 'Hide' in the top right corner.

If you would like to disable notifications for small payments on your account, simply head to 'Notifications' in the LOBSTR Settings and switch off 'Receive updates for small payments'.