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name: bitcoin-libraries-rust-bitcoin description: | rust-bitcoin: Rust crate for Bitcoin primitives. Tx, Block, Script, Address, Network, key types, PSBT, BIP32. Foundation for BDK, LDK, miniscript-rs. USE WHEN: building Bitcoin apps in Rust, parsing/constructing txs, working with addresses + scripts. allowed-tools: Read, Grep, Glob

rust-bitcoin

The foundation Rust crate for Bitcoin. Used by BDK, LDK, miniscript-rs, electrs, etc. Stable, comprehensive.

Repo: github.com/rust-bitcoin/rust-bitcoin.

Install

[dependencies]
bitcoin = "0.32"   # resolves to 0.32.102 (July 2026)

Two 0.32 lines ship in parallel as of September 2026: 0.32.11 (2026-07-22, MSRV 1.56.1) for old toolchains, and the 0.32.10x line (latest 0.32.102, 2026-07-15), which since 0.32.101 (2026-06-24) has MSRV 1.60.0 and exposes the optional encoding feature wrapping the sans-IO consensus_encoding crate — enabling that feature raises the MSRV to 1.74.0. 0.32.100 was yanked because its blanket 1.74.0 MSRV bump was too aggressive.

0.33-beta and the 1.0 track

0.33.0-beta (2026-02-23) is the testing release for the next major API; upstream states it will never release a plain 0.33.0 — the next tag is 0.34.0-beta, and the -beta suffix drops once bitcoin-units, bitcoin-primitives and bitcoin-consensus-encoding reach 1.0.0. Of those three, only bitcoin-consensus-encoding has shipped 1.x (1.2.0, 2026-08-13); as of September 2026 bitcoin-primitives is at 0.103.0 and bitcoin-units at 0.5.0 stable, with 1.0.0-rc builds published.

Breaking changes already in 0.33.0-beta:

• Amount enforces a MAX_MONEY invariant. Amount::MAX is now 21 million BTC instead of u64::MAX, and Amount::from_sat returns Result<Amount, OutOfRangeError>.
• Psbt serde representation changed (breaking).
• MSRV bumped 1.63.0 -> 1.74.0 across every crate in the repo.

Key types

• Transaction, TxIn, TxOut, OutPoint.
• Script, ScriptBuf, Address, Network.
• Block, BlockHash, block::Header (there is no BlockHeader at the crate root).
• secp256k1::SecretKey, secp256k1::PublicKey.
• bip32::Xpriv, Xpub, DerivationPath — ExtendedPrivKey / ExtendedPubKey survive only as aliases deprecated since 0.31.
• psbt::Psbt (BIP174).

Quick examples

Address generation

use bitcoin::{Address, CompressedPublicKey, Network};
use bitcoin::secp256k1::{Secp256k1, SecretKey, PublicKey};

let secp = Secp256k1::new();
let sk = SecretKey::from_slice(&[1u8; 32]).unwrap();
let pk = PublicKey::from_secret_key(&secp, &sk);
let addr = Address::p2wpkh(&CompressedPublicKey(pk), Network::Bitcoin);
println!("{}", addr);   // bc1q...

Address::p2wpkh(pk: &CompressedPublicKey, hrp: impl Into<KnownHrp>) returns Address directly, not a Result — no unwrap(). A bitcoin::PublicKey may be uncompressed, so converting one is fallible (CompressedPublicKey::try_from).

Parse + construct tx

use bitcoin::{Transaction, consensus::encode};

let raw = hex::decode("01000000...").unwrap();
let tx: Transaction = encode::deserialize(&raw).unwrap();
println!("txid: {}", tx.compute_txid());

let bytes = encode::serialize(&tx);

Sign with secp256k1

let secp = Secp256k1::new();
let msg = bitcoin::secp256k1::Message::from_digest_slice(&hash).unwrap();
let sig = secp.sign_ecdsa(&msg, &sk);

Modules

• consensus — wire format encode/decode.
• blockdata — block / tx / script.
• network — message types, magic bytes.
• psbt — partially-signed tx.
• bip32 — HD derivation.
• taproot — Taproot (TaprootBuilder, ControlBlock).
• address — addr parsing + generation.

Use cases

• Wallet / signer / explorer code in Rust.
• Backend services consuming Bitcoin data.
• Foundation for higher-level libs (BDK, LDK).

Common pitfalls

• API churn between minor versions in 0.x range. Pin carefully.
• Script (zero-cost wrapper) vs ScriptBuf (owned) — most APIs take &Script.
• Network mismatch errors when building cross-network apps.

See also

• bdk/SKILL.md
• ldk/SKILL.md
• miniscript-rs/SKILL.md
• secp256k1-rs/SKILL.md
• corepc/SKILL.md
• bitcoin-kernel/SKILL.md