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Send and receive BTC/LTC - difference between SegWit and Legacy address
Send and receive BTC/LTC - difference between SegWit and Legacy address

Transferring BTC and LTC - Difference between SegWit and Legacy addresses

Updated over a month ago

Crypto.com Onchain currently supports sending BTC/LTC with SegWit address. As for receiving BTC/LTC into your SegWit wallet, you may send BTC/LTC from your Legacy or SegWit address - as long as your current wallet supports sending to SegWit.

For BTC:

  • Legacy (P2PKH): addresses start with a 1

  • Nested SegWit (P2SH): addresses start with a 3

  • Native SegWit (bech32): addresses start with bc1

For LTC:

  • Legacy: addresses start with a L

  • SegWit (P2SH): addresses start with a 3 or M

Please note that if you have imported an external wallet on Crypto.com Onchain with Legacy BTC/LTC addresses, unfortunately the legacy balances will not be displayed on Crypto.com Onchain .

What is the difference between SegWit and Legacy address?

Legacy address is the original BTC address while SegWit is the newer address format with lower fees.

SegWit means Segregated Witness, where Segregated is to separate and Witness is the transaction signatures involved with a specific transaction. In a nutshell, it is an improvement over the current bitcoin blockchain which reduces the size needed to store transactions in a block.

Why use SegWit?

The main benefit of separating the transaction signature from the transaction data is it reduces the size of the transaction data needed to store in one block. This allows each block to have extra capacity to store more transactions per block. This means the network can process more transactions per block and the sender pays lower transaction fees. This helps to improve your transaction confirmation lead time with added security.

Another advantage of SegWit is that they are backwards compatible, meaning that you are able to send funds from a SegWit address to a Legacy address.

Why can’t I send BTC/LTC from my external legacy address to Crypto.com Onchain?

One major downside with a SegWit address is that not all wallets, exchanges and services support sending to them. You will need to make sure that whatever you are using to send to your Crypto.com Onchain SegWit address understands the Segwit address.

If you see invalid BTC/LTC address error on where you’re initiating the send, it’s very likely that the wallet does not support SegWit.

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