Exchange Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin (BTC) is the first cryptocurrency, running on a proof-of-work network. Transfers go into blocks roughly every 10 minutes, the sender pays a fee for space in a block, and the total supply can never exceed 21 million coins.

Bitcoin is most often bought through a swap to turn stablecoins and other coins into BTC held straight in your own wallet. Another common reason is moving BTC to the Liquid network as L-BTC, where a block comes every minute.

Bitcoin has four common address types. SegWit starts with bc1q and is usually 42 characters long, Taproot starts with bc1p and is 62 characters. Older addresses start with 1 (legacy) or 3 (script addresses, including wrapped SegWit) and are 26–34 characters long. You can send to any of them, but an old wallet or service sometimes does not know bc1p addresses — in that case use a bc1q address.

A bc1 address is not case-sensitive, but it must not mix upper and lower case. Addresses starting with 1 and 3 are case-sensitive, so copy them instead of typing. Bitcoin has no memo or tag: exchanges give each user a separate deposit address.

The fee is paid in BTC and depends on the transaction size in bytes and on network load, not on the amount. It is set as a rate in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB). With a rate that is too low, a transfer can wait in the mempool for hours or days. It can be sped up by replacing it with a higher fee (RBF) or with a child transaction (CPFP), if the wallet supports it.

A block comes every 10 minutes on average, but the interval is random: it can be one minute or more than an hour. Recipients usually wait for 1 to 3 confirmations, so crediting BTC takes from 10 minutes to an hour.

Besides its own network, BTC exists as tokens: L-BTC on Liquid, and on NEAR and Aptos — these networks are listed further down the page. They are separate assets with their own addresses: a confidential Liquid address usually starts with lq1 or VJL, on NEAR it is an account name like name.near or a 64-character string, on Aptos it is 0x followed by 64 hex characters. An address starting with 1, 3 or bc1 does not work for them.