You might have noticed an icon on Coinbits that may or may not be familiar to you.

It’s pronounced “sats” and it represents one 100,000,000th (one hundred millionth) of a bitcoin.

Just like you can divide a dollar into 100 units called cents, you can divide a bitcoin into 100,000,000 units called satoshis. The name comes from Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin. Over time, “satoshis” got shortened to "sats."

Even though the currency symbol for bitcoin was designed in 2010, there was not a design made for sats back then. Sats used to be relatively unknown outside the group of people who were building software with bitcoin, because sats were too small to matter to end users. With bitcoin costing only a few cents or a few dollars, there was little concern for sats, because they represented an infinitesimally small amount of value.

However, as bitcoin’s price rose over the years, sats became important. Most people who use bitcoin use it for transactions that are much smaller than one bitcoin. Eventually, bitcoin software companies began allowing users to display bitcoin amounts in sats.

Why Coinbits chose the Sats Symbol

The Sats Symbol is not yet universal. However, we made the choice to adopt it for a few important reasons.

Coinbits is a hybrid platform. Our software allows you to interact with bitcoin while remaining backward-compatible with fiat. In order to design a UI for that, we need a symbol that can be placed in the same position and be the same dimensions as the $ and ₿ currency symbols.

The only alternative to the Sats Symbol with wide acceptance is to place the word "sats" after the number. However, this is not a good solution for Coinbits because it would require the visual layout of lines that display currencies to be inconsistent.

Although we have no reason to believe the predominant symbol for sats is going to change away from this symbol, we are not strong proponents of any particular design solution. If another symbol becomes more prominent and widely accepted by the bitcoin community, we will update Coinbits so that it fits the expectations of our members. Our goal is to make bitcoin understandable and accessible to all.

Learn the origin story of the sat symbol as told by its creator.

How to activate sats on Coinbits

1. Navigate to Settings and choose Preferences.
2. Click Satoshi.

That's it! All bitcoin amounts will now be displayed in sats.