Reading a Crypto Address: BTC, LTC, and XMR Format Differences

The three address formats you will see on a Tor marketplace deposit page, how to tell them apart at a glance, and what the format implies about cost and privacy.

If you have funded a marketplace balance in different coins, you have noticed that the addresses look nothing like each other. Bitcoin addresses are a particular shape, Litecoin addresses look like a sibling of the Bitcoin shape, and Monero addresses are the long ones that fill the whole input box. The differences are not cosmetic. Each format reveals something about how the coin works on the chain and what the trade is when you choose it. This page is a quick visual and structural guide to the three.

Bitcoin addresses

A modern Bitcoin address is a forty-two character string starting with bc1. This is the bech32 format, used for SegWit and Taproot addresses. The address encodes a public key hash plus a small checksum, and the bc1 prefix marks it as a SegWit address on the main Bitcoin network. Older legacy addresses (starting with 1 or 3) still work, but most marketplaces issue bech32 by default because the fees on bech32 transactions are lower.

The visual rule of thumb: forty-two characters, bc1q at the start, all lowercase. If you see uppercase letters in what claims to be a Bitcoin address, something is wrong; bech32 addresses are case-insensitive in the protocol but always written lowercase.

Litecoin addresses

A modern Litecoin address is also bech32 and starts with ltc1. Same forty-two-ish character length, same lowercase convention, same structure. The only practical difference from Bitcoin at the address level is the prefix. Legacy Litecoin addresses start with L or M, and you will sometimes see those in older deposit pages.

The privacy properties of Litecoin addresses are identical to Bitcoin's. The chain is public, transactions are clusterable, and the same analytics firms that index Bitcoin index Litecoin. The advantage of Litecoin is speed and fees, not privacy.

Monero addresses

A Monero address is the long one: ninety-five characters for a standard address, one hundred and six characters for an integrated address (which embeds a payment ID). The encoding is base58, which uses both upper and lowercase letters. The first character of a main-net Monero address is 4.

The reason Monero addresses are so much longer than Bitcoin and Litecoin is that they contain two keys, not one: a public spend key and a public view key, both encoded into the address. The view key is what lets the recipient detect incoming payments without exposing the spend key. The combination is what makes stealth addresses possible.

If a Monero address is one hundred and six characters, the last eleven characters are a payment ID. Payment IDs were widely used in the past to distinguish deposits to the same exchange account; modern wallets and marketplaces use subaddresses instead, which produce different ninety-five character addresses for each deposit without needing a payment ID.

What the formats imply

The Bitcoin and Litecoin formats are compact because the chains are not designed to hide the address. Public, clusterable, fast lookups. The Monero format is long because the chain hides every payment by deriving fresh one-time on-chain destinations from the published address, and that machinery needs more bytes in the address itself.

For the privacy properties this enables, see Ring Signatures: What Makes Monero's Ledger Different.

The mistake to avoid

Never send Bitcoin to a Litecoin address, or any coin to an address that does not match. Bech32 checksums prevent typo-level mistakes within the same network, but they do not prevent cross-network mistakes. A Bitcoin transaction sent to a Litecoin address is valid Bitcoin transaction syntax pointing at an address only meaningful on the Litecoin chain; the result is funds locked in a way that requires careful recovery, and sometimes are simply gone. Copy the address. Read the prefix. Make sure the coin you are sending matches the network of the address.

The deposit page on any well-run marketplace makes this clear by labelling each address with the coin name and refusing to issue an address you cannot use. The error is human, not platform.