Bitcoin SegWit Transactions Hit 50% for the First Time

After a steady growth for the past year, SegWit now comprises half of the total Bitcoin transactions. Just recently, Coinbase, crypto hardware wallet KeepKey, and another crypto wallet BRD enabled support for SegWit protocol.

SegWit now comprises half of the total Bitcoin transactions

According to the data from Transactionfee.info, SegWit has crossed 50 percent mark for the first time after going through constant uprise in its adoption.

First proposed in late 2015 by Pieter Wuille, Segregated Witness (SegWit) has been a controversial upgrade that improves the transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network by reducing the size of bitcoin transactions and thus reducing fees for users.

Slow on the uptake, SegWit has been on a gradual ascent. A couple of days back, it took a jump from just 42 percent to about 53 percent. However, the next day it went down to 45 percent yet again as shown in the chart below.

The faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions enabler, SegWit protocol saw a good spike in the month of May as it jumped to about 40 percent from 27 percent.

Just recently, the popular US exchange Coinbase announced the support for the Bech32 last week. Moreover, KeepKey, a hardware wallet also enabled the support in its update.

Last month, Bitcoin block 540107 became the biggest ever mined at 2.26 megabytes partly due to SegWit that enables blocks over 2 megabytes.

Also, read: Bitcoin getting Boring? Mainstream Big Names Unaffected as More Invest in Crypto Space

A steady growth towards complete support

The spike in SegWit transactions could be attributed to its adoption by the BRD crypto wallet that began the support for the protocol at the beginning of this October, as Aaron Lasher, the Chief Strategy Officer at BRD shared,

“[BRD] support [for SegWit] will start with an opt-in period beginning in October 2018, allowing all forward-thinking pioneers to take the plunge into the new Bech32 (a SegWit address format) world and turn their smartphones into a pure SegWit machine. Shortly thereafter, these changes will be rolled out to our entire user base as the default setting.”

In order to speed up adoption as Bech32 isn’t backward compatible, Lasher further states:

“If we can rapidly establish Bech32 as the default address format, and discourage the use of P2SH addresses, we can create a temporary rift where senders are obliged to upgrade their software in order to serve receiving customers.”

SegWit adoption helps in lowering the bitcoin transaction fees which is good for everyone which means at the current rate, 100 percent SegWit support can be achieved by next year.