Pay to Script (P2S)
Bitcoin Cash relay policy that permits compact, directly encoded locking scripts without wrapping them in P2SH.
- Acronym
- P2S
- Also known as
- P2S
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
Explore connected entries beyond the alphabetical index.
P2SH
→A script type where the output is locked to the hash of a redeem script, enabling features like multi-sig.
Smart Contract
→Blockchain-enforced program or script logic that controls how assets or state may change.
CashVM
→An ecosystem name for the stack-based virtual machine that evaluates Bitcoin Cash spending bytecode.
Protocol Upgrade
→A coordinated change to the rules, messages, or policies implemented by network software.