# Why is my cycles wallet canister slowly losing cycles?

**URL:** https://forum.dfinity.org/t/why-is-my-cycles-wallet-canister-slowly-losing-cycles/13190
**Category:** Developers
**Created:** [May 22, 2022, 5:21am UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/why-is-my-cycles-wallet-canister-slowly-losing-cycles/13190 "2022-05-22T05:21:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 11

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### Author: ![Vivienne](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex023/user_avatar/forum.dfinity.org/vivienne/32/29170_2.png) [@Vivienne](https://forum.dfinity.org/u/Vivienne)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2022, 7:19am UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/why-is-my-cycles-wallet-canister-slowly-losing-cycles/13190/11 "2022-05-25T07:19:47Z")

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Looks like I failed to explain things well enough.

There’s two separate _controllers_:

1. The controllers in the view of the IC (I’ll call those _canister controllers_): What you actually think about when you hear the term ‘controller’. A canister controller can request a canister’s status, start/stop/delete the canister, install new wasm modules, and so on. `dfx canister info` returns the list of canister controllers.
2. The controllers in the \_internal\_view of the wallet (I’ll call those _wallet controllers_): Here is the definition of a wallet controller: [[wallet code](https://github.com/dfinity/cycles-wallet/blob/main/wallet/src/address.rs#L9-L22)]. This is what the code running inside the wallet canister (what I called _wallet wasm_ in my previous post) defines as its own notion of a controller. This is totally fine from a technical standpoint, but very confusing as shown by this thread. This wallet controller can NOT perform the tasks listed for the canister controller, but instead can transfer cycles, add/remove custodians, list the history of transactions in this wallet and so on. `dfx wallet controllers` returns the list of wallet controllers.

In the end, it’s just a name clash between two related, but distinct concepts, caused by an unfortunate name overlap. Does this clear up the confusion, @jzxchiang?

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