Sending peso from your CoopPay to another CoopPay, whether of your friend or your cooperative, is free.
Peso ➡️ Peso
Sending peso from CoopPay to save bitcoin in another custodial Lightning wallet (Blink, Coinos, etc.) the conversion and transfer fee is around 1%. This is the cheapest we know of. So for members of cooperatives nationwide, CoopPay is the easiest gateway to Lightning and bitcoin.
Peso ➡️ ₿
You can also save bitcoin inside CoopPay (or Pouch.ph) itself. The easiest way to do this is thru the new Daily Buy feature, where you save in bitcoin for as low as Php 10 daily.
But what if you’re ready to take things to another level? We mean this in two ways. One is to send peso from CoopPay to save bitcoin in a non-custodial Lightning wallet (Phoenix, etc).
This would be slightly be more expensive that sending to another custodial Lightning wallet. However, you are closer to self-sovereignty since in custodial wallet like CoopPay/Pouch.ph, the latter has custody of your money while in a non-custodial wallet, you have your seed phrase and full control of your funds.
The second way to up your bitcoin game is to send the peso that you have in CoopPay, the bitcoin that you have in CoopPay or any custodial or non-custodial Lightning wallet to a bitcoin wallet on-chain. (Muun, Aqua, etc.)
₿ ➡️ ₿
Assuming you have done your homework, this is the pinnacle of being a bitcoiner and you should try this as soon as you are ready.
We have built this bitcoin transfer fee estimator for you. If you are ready to try it and the transfer fee/s you are seeing in your wallet/s seem confusing, play with this first to have an idea!
Easy BTC Transfer Fee Estimator
When you send bitcoin, miners verify, secure, and add your transaction to the blockchain. The fee is like a tip to encourage miners to prioritize your transaction and make sure it goes through faster.
The size of a transaction isn’t about how much money you’re sending. Try 1,000,000 and see.
Why 226 virtual bytes? Standard transaction (1 input, 2 outputs) is typically 226 vbytes.
On-chain transfers are typically more expensive and transaction confirmation times longer. Transferring bitcoin on-chain is necessary when the recipient doesn’t use the Lightning Network, when you need a permanent and secure transaction recorded on the blockchain, or when moving large amounts that Lightning may not handle well.
While on-chain transactions are slower (about 10 minutes or more) and have higher fees, they offer greater security and universal acceptance across all Bitcoin wallets and services.
Nonetheless, doing it with CoopPay/Pouch.ph is still the cheapest, as far as we know. On January 31, 2025, Pouch.ph wrote,
“Due to an influx of requests, we have reverted the min fee for on-chain sends. In its place, we will add an advisory on small transactions to consider consolidating UTXOs during low fee times, as a measure to prevent unexpected high transaction costs down the road. Example on-chain withdrawal fees:
Amount: ₱644, Fee: ₱32
Amount: ₱6,000, Fee: ₱66
Amount: ₱60,000, Fee: ₱259
On Coins, it’s ₱2,447.85
On PDAX, it’s ₱3,671.77”
Additional Lessons
A UTXO is like getting change in cash—bitcoin transactions spend existing UTXOs and create new ones as change, tracking ownership without accounts.
UTXO stands for Unspent Transaction Output. It refers to the outputs of a bitcoin transaction that have not yet been spent or used as inputs in a new transaction. In simpler terms, UTXOs are the portions of bitcoin that are available to be spent. When you send a bitcoin transaction, you are using UTXOs from previous transactions as inputs, and any remaining balance from those UTXOs becomes new outputs, creating UTXOs again.
For example, if you receive .001 BTC, and then decide to send 0.0005 BTC to someone, the 0.0005 BTC will be spent, but the other 0.0005 BTC is returned to you as change, forming a new UTXO.
Bitcoin is digital money that lets you send and receive value anywhere without a bank. It runs on a secure, decentralized network where transactions are verified by computers worldwide. Bitcoin has a strict supply limit of 21,000,000 bitcoins. In other words, only 21M bitcoins will ever be produced. It’s generally estimated that the last bitcoin will be mined in 2140.
Each bitcoin is divided into 100,000,000 satoshis. So one (1) satoshi is 0.0000001 BTC. This small unit allows for very precise transactions, which is especially useful given the increasing value of bitcoin.
Bitcoin blockchain is the digital ledger that records bitcoin transactions in secure, linked blocks. It’s decentralized, meaning no single person or company controls it, making it transparent and hard to tamper with.
A bitcoin miner is a powerful computer that secures the network and processes transactions by solving complex puzzles. In return, miners earn new bitcoins as a reward.
A bitcoin transaction fee is a small payment to miners for processing and securing your transfer. Higher fees make transactions faster, while lower fees may take longer.
Bitcoin fees are based on the data size of a transaction, not the amount sent. More inputs (like breaking a big bill into change) mean more data, which costs more to process.
A virtual byte (vByte) is a unit that measures Bitcoin transaction size for fees. Bigger transactions take more space, so they cost more to send.
A standard bitcoin transaction usually has 1 input (the source of the funds) and 2 outputs: one for the recipient and one for “change” that goes back to the sender. It’s like paying with cash and getting change.
If you want to send 0.0001 Bitcoin, but you have 0.00015 Bitcoin, you’ll send the full 0.00015 Bitcoin. The receiver gets 0.0001 Bitcoin, and the remaining 0.00005 Bitcoin (the change) comes back to you.
A standard transaction that uses 266 vBytes means it takes up 266 units of space on the Bitcoin network. The more space a transaction takes, the higher the fee, because it’s costing more to process. t’s similar to bytes in computing. Just like files on your computer take up space in bytes, Bitcoin transactions take up space in vBytes, which determines how much it costs to process them.