Muxed accounts, a new type of Stellar account that makes it easy to map a single Stellar address to multiple users, are now live.

At this point, all products and services built on Stellar need to make sure they can validate and send payments to muxed accounts. Additionally, products and services that use a pooled account model should come up with a plan to implement muxed accounts on the receive side to improve user experience and eliminate missing memo problems.

Before muxed accounts, exchanges and other custodial services that use pooled accounts required users to add memos to transactions in order to route payments to the correct account in their internal databases. The biggest problem with relying on memos: user error. People frequently forget to include required memos when submitting transactions, which resulted in lost funds or onerous support calls.

Muxed accounts eliminate the need for memos, and contain a checksum that can be validated like traditional Stellar addresses, so there is a reduced risk of typos. They also allow users or applications to apply memo-like functionality at the operation level, so they can bundle multiple payment operations to multiple muxed accounts into a single transaction, which may be beneficial to some applications.