Sat Protection on the Bitcoin network is the use of coin selection by your Phantom wallet to protect your Bitcoin NFTs and tokens from being mistakenly spent on regular BTC send transactions and network fees.
Whenever you want to make in-app transactions such as sending BTC, Ordinals, or BRC20 tokens from one of your Phantom addresses, only UTXOs which are safe to spend are used. What this means is that in standard BTC transactions, only 'spendable' BTC will be used for the transaction amount including fees. This is because you want to protect your Ordinal and BRC20s. Phantom determines that a UTXO is safe to send if both of the following are true:
- UTXO does not contain an inscription.
- UTXO does not contain a rare sat.
If you happen to notice a difference between your wallet balance vs the max sendable amount when sending, this is because the max sendable amount on the send form excludes UTXOs that are not safe to send.