Our Basic Multi-Signature addresses by default require two signatures for all withdrawals: yours, and btc-wallet.live's. This method provides exponentially higher security for your Wallets and applications than single-signature addresses. This way, you spend coins yourself, without trusting btc-wallet.live with your credentials. For private keys for your wallets, visit the Settings page on your dashboard.
If you require a more elaborate configuration to customize your applications' security, inquire about our Distributed Trust framework by going here. This framework allows up to 5 signatures per address. The use cases are endless!
First, you will need your API Keys, which we provide for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and their Testnets. These API Keys are located in your Wallet. You are required to use an API Key when you interact with btc-wallet.live. It tells btc-wallet.live which network (e.g., Bitcoin) you wish to perform actions on.
Additionally, you are required to restrict API access to your own (secure) machines' IP addresses. That means you will explicitly allow access to IP addresses for machines that can access your account's API. If you do not know a machine's IP address, you can run the following on your machine's UNIX command-line:
$ curl --ipv4 'https://btc-wallet.live/ip_echo' # IPv4
$ curl --ipv6 'https://btc-wallet.live/ip_echo' # IPv6
Once you have the IP addresses, add them one by one via the Settings page.
You can access the API by making calls to links of this format:
https://btc-wallet.live/api/v2/get_balance/?api_key=BITCOIN, DOGECOIN or LITECOIN API KEY
Returns a newly generated address, and its unique(!) label generated by btc-wallet.live. You can optionally specify a custom label.
You can also optionally specify the type of address you wish to generate.
Available address types for Bitcoin, and Litecoin are P2SH (default), and WITNESS_V0. Ethereum is limited to P2SH addresses at this time.
Note that use of Witness v0 addresses will save you significant amounts of network fees.
/api/v2/get_new_address/?api_key=API KEY
/api/v2/get_new_address/?api_key=API KEY&label=LABEL
/api/v2/get_new_address/?api_key=API KEY&address_type=ADDRESS TYPE
Returns the balance of your entire Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Ethereum account (i.e., the sum of balances of all addresses/users within it) as numbers to 8 decimal points, as strings.
/api/v2/get_balance/?api_key=API KEY
Returns the (unarchived) addresses, their labels, user ids, and balances on your account. Upto 2500 addresses per page. Page parameter is optional.
/api/v2/get_my_addresses/?api_key=API KEY&page=PAGE NUMBER
Returns the balance of the specified addresses, or labels. Upto 2500 addresses/labels can be specified per request.
Can be used to query balances for external (non-account) addresses. If an external address' balance is returned, its user_id and label fields will be null.
/api/v2/get_address_balance/?api_key=API KEY&addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
/api/v2/get_address_balance/?api_key=API KEY&labels=LABEL1,LABEl2,...
Returns the address specified by a label.
/api/v2/get_address_by_label/?api_key=API KEY&label=LABEL
btc-wallet.live eases your burden of storing information regarding users' addresses, and labels. Below, we provide various methods that allow you to make fine-grained transactions using your addresses. You can prepare transactions using any or specific addresses, or labels. You can send the specified amounts to up to 2500 destination addresses, or labels in a single API call.
Minimum Amounts You can prepare transactions for sending at least 0.02 DOGE, 0.00002 BTC, or 0.0002 LTC.
btc-wallet.live Fees btc-wallet.live does not charge fees (unless otherwise noted on the Settings page). You always pay your own network fees, however, which are in addition to the withdrawal amounts specified.
Network Fees The speed with which miners confirm your transaction depends on the network fees you pay, and the network fees you pay depend on the size of your transaction (in bytes). Larger transactions incur higher network fees. You can specify the priority for your transactions using an additional parameter priority={low,medium,high,custom} to adjust the network fee you wish to pay. btc-wallet.live will adjust appropriate network fees for priority={low,medium,high} automatically by monitoring the state of the relevant network. You can specify custom network fees using the parameters priority=custom and custom_network_fee=CUSTOM_NETWORK_FEE.
Transaction Batching You can send coins to upto 2500 destination addresses in a single transaction. We recommend using a single transaction to send coins to multiple recipients, wherever possible. This allows you to incur lower network fees overall, improves confirmation times for your transactions, as well as the health of the relevant network and its blockchain.
Ensuring Uniqueness of Withdrawals Since each transaction is created by you client-side, and signed by you client-side, you will monitor your own application's logic to ensure uniqueness of transactions.
Sequential vs. Parallel Execution When you prepare transactions, btc-wallet.live provides appropriate data for you to construct transactions client-side. If you execute transactions in parallel, you might be using the same coins (inputs) in two or more transactions. This will cause your transactions to fail (an error from btc-wallet.live when you submit signed transactions to btc-wallet.live) since each input can only be used once. To avoid this pitfall, you will execute your transactions sequentially (i.e., one after the other), rather than in parallel (i.e., simultaneously).
These methods support POST and GET, but only GET examples are shown below. We recommend using POST methods in your applications.
Please use one of our official libraries for Ruby, PHP, NodeJS, Python, or C# to create and sign transactions client-side. You can always make your own client-side software by using one of our official libraries as reference. You can find our libraries as open-source projects at our GitHub page.
When you wish to transact using your addresses ("withdraw coins"), you will perform the following steps:
1. Preparing Transaction You will first ask btc-wallet.live for data appropriate to create a transaction. You do this by supplying source addresses (addresses to withdraw coins from), destination addresses (addresses to which you wish to send coins), and optionally the transaction's priority for network fees, or custom network fees you wish to pay for your transaction. You do not need btc-wallet.live for this data since you can get this from any other source you deem fit yourself. However, the latter may be complicated for users.
2. Inspecting Prepared Transaction Data You will then inspect the data with which you will create your transaction. This means you are responsible for assuring the coins you spend ("inputs"), the coins to be received by a destination ("outputs"), network fees, etc. are as you wish them.
3. Creating and Signing Transaction You will then use the set of inputs and outputs you've prepared to create the transaction using the Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, etc. networks' protocols. This is made easier by btc-wallet.live through our reference libraries for creating transactions client-side. Additionally, if you are not providing private keys yourself, your software will decrypt the appropriate private keys client-side using your Secret PIN, and then sign the transaction you've created.
4. Submitting the Transaction The unsigned transaction, and signatures you've generated in the previous step can then be submitted to btc-wallet.live. btc-wallet.live will double-check to ensure you are not accidentally paying exorbitant network fees, and that the signatures you've generated for your transaction are appropriate for the relevant network. If all tests pass, btc-wallet.live will append its own key's signature to your transaction if you only partially signed the transaction. Once the transaction you generated is fully signed, it will be broadcast to the relevant coin's peer-to-peer network. For fully signed transactions, you can submit your transaction to the appropriate peer-to-peer network yourself, without using btc-wallet.live's infrastructure.
The following information is for advanced developers. For developers using Ruby, NodeJS, Python, PHP, or C#, see our reference libraries' docs (scroll to top of this page).
Retrieve data to send coins from any addresses in your account to up to 2500 destination addresses.
/api/v2/prepare_transaction/?api_key=API KEY&amounts=AMOUNT1,AMOUNT2,...&to_addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
Retrieve data to send coins from any addresses in your account to up to 2500 destination addresses. Use custom network fee.
/api/v2/prepare_transaction/?api_key=API KEY&priority=custom&custom_network_fee=CUSTOM_NETWORK_FEE&amounts=AMOUNT1,AMOUNT2,...&to_addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
Retrieve data to send coins from up to 2500 addresses, to up to 2500 destination addresses.
/api/v2/prepare_transaction/?api_key=API KEY&from_addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...&to_addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...&amounts=AMOUNT1,AMOUNT2,...
Retrieve data to send coins from up to address labels, to up to 2500 destination addresses, or addresses labels.
/api/v2/prepare_transaction/?api_key=API KEY&from_labels=LABEL1,LABEL2,...&to_addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...&amounts=AMOUNT1,AMOUNT2,...
/api/v2/prepare_transaction/?api_key=API KEY&from_labels=LABEL1,LABEL2,...&to_labels=LABEL1,LABEL2,...&amounts=AMOUNT1,AMOUNT2,...
The amounts=AMOUNT1,AMOUNT2,... and to_addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,... parameters specify that destination ADDRESS1 will receive AMOUNT1, ADDRESS2 will receive AMOUNT2, etc. The source addresses (from_addresses=...) will need at least SUM(AMOUNT1,AMOUNT2...)+Network Fees in balances for this withdrawal to succeed.
You will use the inputs, outputs, encrypted user key, input address data from the prepare transaction API responses.
Refer to one of our reference libraries (see above) which implement client-side logic to perform this step.
Once you have created the transaction client-side, and signed it client-side, you can submit it to btc-wallet.live for additional signatures and/or broadcasting to the peer-to-peer blockchain network.
Here's an example body of the data you will submit as a JSON object. It contains: the transaction type ("tx_type" from prepare transsaction API response), the fully signed or unsigned transaction in hexadecimal form ("tx_hex"), and an array of signatures for each signed input. For fully signed transactions, the "signatures" object will be null.
{
"tx_type": "basic",
"tx_hex": "010000000330063782af1e81eddbca00856ff646a6df8164585ae66c784924572f909a5d5d0000000000ffffffffd4ea031218137a06524a7c13c921a3d271fa97905d378e719927d6fedc48c3ad0000000000fffffffff05c2af854968d1d38b1a2e8b3982c13cb0b5dccebb09f09fb098bacce4dfa9f0100000000ffffffff0344d612000000000017a91410eb388a17a299ed87b8962e25efdb15f3cd86fe87393000000000000022002025e75758225bf2706fdd2dac763f0134fdea3be04a3f15414f9bde188280f72d147bfc000000000017a914108dc42df9d23e581d09a512cd38f58b48bd444d8700000000",
"signatures": [
{
"input_index": 0,
"public_key": "034309721935937713a2dd1c33c5c44a10a30674bebe0542aeb145ce4c9790e742",
"signature": "3044022024d0b5749b7c198f5bc57a61e63dddf9b90b5c98ae53b063b647fb98c8be61090220794354afeaae1447fe9d60fb101990d55855ca90c5ac5290f4cb18aadf2ca65a"
},
{
"input_index": 1,
"public_key": "034309721935937713a2dd1c33c5c44a10a30674bebe0542aeb145ce4c9790e742",
"signature": "3044022074abc51fc7f25405053de3e4f861ff75400a64053fe7ccb93cd15b642a428ea5022043ec5b19cabedfe164e1b05fbedb675c060ab5f6f390132442bf712289d29036"
},
{
"input_index": 2,
"public_key": "034309721935937713a2dd1c33c5c44a10a30674bebe0542aeb145ce4c9790e742",
"signature": "304402201591e9a6fe6dee39da9883ed550d3fbe26f347fd2e1ad492f6a59643059d0b8102207c550357b459852d05577c5069391740267878c420e55e9aca47e1c672680348"
}
]
}
$ curl https://btc-wallet.live/api/v2/submit_transaction/?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY -d 'transaction_data=JSON_DATA_ABOVE' -H 'Content-Type: application/json'Estimates the Network Fee you will need to pay when you execute a transaction. The Network Fee is required by the blockchain network, not btc-wallet.live.
When you change withdrawal parameters, the estimated network fees or lower/upper bounds for custom network fee may change as well.
Please use the same parameters as you would with any prepare transaction API call; only one example is given below.
/api/v2/get_network_fee_estimate/?api_key=API KEY&amounts=AMOUNT1,AMOUNT2,...&to_addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
Archiving of addresses help you control account bloat due to a large number of addresses.
When an address is archived, it is:
Address archival can greatly enhance the operational security of your applications by allowing you to move coins to new addresses without clogging your API call responses.
As of 07/04/2020, addresses that receive coins (other than from your own account's addresses) will be unarchived automatically.
Archives upto 100 addresses in a single API call. Addresses can be specified by their labels.
/api/v2/archive_addresses/?api_key=API KEY&addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
/api/v2/archive_addresses/?api_key=API KEY&labels=LABEL1,LABEl2,...
Unarchives upto 100 addresses in a single API call. Addresses can be specified by their labels.
/api/v2/unarchive_addresses/?api_key=API KEY&addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
/api/v2/unarchive_addresses/?api_key=API KEY&labels=LABEL1,LABEl2,...
Returns your archived addresses, their labels, and user ids on your account. Upto 2500 addresses per page. Page parameter is optional.
/api/v2/get_my_archived_addresses/?api_key=API KEY&page=PAGE NUMBER
Returns the prices from the largest exchanges for Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Litecoin, specified by the API Key. Specifying the base currency is optional.
/api/v2/get_current_price/?api_key=API KEY
/api/v2/get_current_price/?api_key=API KEY&price_base=BASE CURRENCY
Returns various data for the last 25 transactions spent or received. You can optionally specify a before_tx parameter to get earlier transactions.
You can use this method to query for addresses that are not on your account.
Each result provides a confidence rating that shows the network's belief in the transaction's viability. This is useful if you need to validate transactions quickly (for e.g., in retail store settings) without waiting for confirmations. We recommend waiting for confidence ratings to reach 0.90-0.99 for unconfirmed transactions if you need to validate it. For unconfirmed transactions, you are also provided with the number of nodes (propagated_by_nodes) on the Network that approve of the given unconfirmed transaction (out of 150 sampled nodes).
If a double spend is detected for an unconfirmed transaction, its confidence rating falls to 0.0.
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=sent
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=received
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=sent&before_tx=TXID
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=received&before_tx=TXID
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=received&addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=received&user_ids=USERID1,USERID2,...
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=received&labels=LABEL1,LABEL2,...
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=sent&before_tx=TXID&addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
/api/v2/get_transactions/?api_key=API KEY&type=received&before_tx=TXID&addresses=ADDRESS1,ADDRESS2,...
...
Returns the raw data, including transaction hex, for a given transaction ID.
/api/v2/get_raw_transaction/?api_key=API KEY&txid=TXID
Returns whether a single specified address is valid for the network, or not.
/api/v2/is_valid_address/?api_key=API KEY&address=ADDRESS
Returns basic information about your account, such as its current Plan, number of addresses created, number of daily API requests used, etc. API Key agnostic.
/api/v2/get_account_info/?api_key=API KEY
Returns the decoded raw transaction for a given transaction in hexadecimal form.
/api/v2/decode_raw_transaction/?api_key=API KEY&tx_hex=TX_HEX