Glossary · Infrastructure

What is UTXO?

The unspent transaction output is Bitcoin's accounting atom: coins exist as discrete outputs waiting to be spent, and a payment consumes whole outputs, returning change as new ones. There is no balance anywhere, only a set of unspent tickets whose sum is what you hold.

The practical consequence is change and consolidation: every spend leaves dust change at new addresses, wallets manage the shuffle invisibly, and a wallet fragmented into many small outputs can make a large payment slower and costlier to assemble.

UTXO on U.CASH

Bitcoin checkouts on U.CASH settle to addresses derived per invoice or to an xpub the merchant controls, and the confirmation policy reads the UTXO's confirmations the way the chain actually counts.

See also

xpubConfirmation policy

UTXO: FAQ

Why does my Bitcoin balance arrive in odd amounts?
Because you are seeing outputs, not a ledger entry: payments consume and create UTXOs of arbitrary sizes. Wallets present the sum; the chain holds the pieces.
Do other chains use UTXOs?
Bitcoin family chains do; Ethereum-family chains use accounts with balances instead. Same money, different bookkeeping, and the checkout abstracts the difference.
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