Sat Protection on the Bitcoin network is the use of coin selection by your Phantom wallet to protect your Bitcoin NFTs and tokens from being mistakenly spent on regular BTC send transactions and network fees.
Whenever you want to make in-app transactions such as sending BTC, Ordinals, or BRC20 tokens from one of your Phantom addresses, only UTXOs which are safe to spend are used. What this means is that in standard BTC transactions, only 'spendable' BTC will be used for the transaction amount including fees. This is because you want to protect your Ordinal and BRC20s. Phantom determines that a UTXO is safe to send if both of the following are true:
- UTXO does not contain an inscription.
- UTXO does not contain a rare sat.
If you happen to notice a difference between your wallet balance vs the max sendable amount when sending, this is because the max sendable amount on the send form excludes UTXOs that are not safe to send.
How can I send my Bitcoin if I have rare sats?
You can use Magiceden's UTXO splitter tool to extract these rare sats. You might need to have more Bitcoin for fees if you have only one UTXO (single coin) to pay the split transaction fees, since if the only one you have has the rare sats it can't be used to pay fees in the process.
To view your rare sats on Magiceden, click the following link: https://magiceden.us/ordinals/discover-raresats
If you find the process of extracting UTXO complex, you can install the Sparrow wallet and import your Bitcoin wallet into Sparrow to access your funds
To do this:
- Download and install the Sparrow wallet from here.
- On your Phantom app, go to Settings > Select the account (first option) > Show seed phrase > Copy the seed phrase.
- Open the Sparrow wallet app > follow the Wizard to Import a wallet with your Phantom wallet phrase. If asked, select BIP39 seed.
Important Note: When sending BTC via Sparrow, sat protection is not automatically enabled and you can lose those rare sats as well as Bitcoin Collectibles that Sparrow might not be aware of. We are not responsible for third party software.