SegWit Now Comprises Almost Half of All Bitcoin Transactions

The overall percentage of Bitcoin transactions using Segregated Witness (SegWit) technology has climbed to all-time highs this week, approaching 40%.

May Sees SegWit Spike

Data from monitoring resource transactionfee.info reproduced on Twitter by investor and entrepreneur Alistair Milne shows steep growth in SegWit’s share beginning earlier in May.

The rise was likely fuelled by wallet and cold storage provider Xapo implementing the technology, Milne commented.

The company’s president Ted Roger confirmed the implementation separately May 24.

Thanks to @xapo recently implementing SegWit, we will likely see >40% of all transactions taking advantage of Bitcoin's extra capacity (and lower fees) very soon! pic.twitter.com/TRmx0Ot6K8

— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) May 25, 2018

SegWit has seen an increasingly broad rollout across the Bitcoin industry in 2018. Allowing for lower fees and faster transactions, its appearance in August last year initially saw slow uptake, with major businesses such as Coinbase only offering its benefits to users months later.

As of press time May 25, SegWit had passed 38% of total Bitcoin transactions for the first time.

Batch That!

Meanwhile, pressure is growing on Bitcoin exchanges, which adopted SegWit to continue improving the efficiency of transactions and reducing fees, as a result, for users by implementing so-called ‘batching.’

Designed to minimize the number of unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) on the Bitcoin blockchain, batching saved money by inserting multiple outputs into one transaction, data for which would not change in size as a result.

While both network fees and usage has decreased in step with prices since 2017, a fresh examination of batching released this week calls for continued “parsimony” to aid Bitcoin scaling.

“If a culture of parsimony can be encouraged, Bitcoin will be able to compress more data into its block space and everyday users will continue to be able to run nodes for the foreseeable future,” the research, led by the analyst known as Hasufly.

We view this as a very positive development. Members of the Bitcoin community that lobbied exchanges to add support for Segwit and batching should be proud of themselves.

Bitfinex, Binance, and Shapeshift already batch transactions, while Coinbase and Coinbase Pro say they have plans to do so.

What do you think about SegWit’s gain in transaction share? Let us know in the comments section below!

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Twitter