Pay to Script (P2S)
bitcoin-cash · script · protocol
Bitcoin Cash relay policy that permits compact, directly encoded locking scripts without wrapping them in P2SH.
Pay to Script (P2S) refers to Bitcoin Cash's standard relay support for spendable outputs whose locking bytecode is encoded directly. Activated in May 2026, it replaced pattern-only output standardness with a length-based rule for scripts up to 201 bytes.
Unlike P2SH, P2S does not hash and hide the locking script until spend time. This can remove the redeem-script wrapper and make some covenants smaller or easier to inspect, while revealing the spending conditions as soon as the output is created.
P2S is principally a standardness-policy change, not a new address format or a promise that every wallet can pay a contract safely. The same upgrade also raised standard token-commitment and unlocking-bytecode limits; contract correctness and application compatibility remain separate concerns.
Related terms
P2SH
→A script type where the output is locked to the hash of a redeem script, enabling features like multi-sig.
script · address
Smart Contract
→Blockchain-enforced program or script logic that controls how assets or state may change.
blockchain · scripting
CashVM
→An ecosystem name for the stack-based virtual machine that evaluates Bitcoin Cash spending bytecode.
bitcoin-cash · protocol · smart-contract
Protocol Upgrade
→A coordinated change to the rules, messages, or policies implemented by network software.
governance · blockchain