What is Bech32: bc1 Bitcoin addresses explained

Bech32 is an address format defined in BIP-173 for native SegWit outputs. Bitcoin addresses that start with bc1q are SegWit version 0 and use Bech32. Taproot addresses, starting with bc1p, use a slightly modified variant called Bech32m, defined in BIP-350. On testnet the prefix is tb1.

Older Bitcoin addresses use Base58Check: legacy addresses start with 1, and P2SH addresses (often used for wrapped SegWit or multisig) start with 3. All these formats are valid today and can send to each other. The practical differences are fees and compatibility: SegWit and Taproot transactions take less block space, so they are usually cheaper to spend from.

Bech32 was designed to be friendly for humans and machines. It uses only lowercase letters and digits, excluding characters that are easy to confuse, and has a strong checksum that detects typos. It is case-insensitive, but mixing upper and lower case in one address is not allowed; an all-uppercase version is valid and encodes more compactly in QR codes.

Typical mistakes are rarely about the format itself. Some old services do not accept sending to bc1 addresses, a Bitcoin address is sometimes confused with a Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin address that looks similar, and customers occasionally send BTC from an exchange using a wrapped token on another network instead of the Bitcoin network.

Moonvex accepts BTC on the Bitcoin network. The payment page shows the address, exact amount and a QR code, and the payment is credited after confirmation by two independent node providers.