Bitcoin SegWit transactions increase to over 50%

Bitcoin transactions sent with Segregated Witness (SegWit) suddenly rose above 50% for the first time yesterday, a Reddit review showed. The Transactionfee.info data uploaded to Reddit shows that Segway’s transactions have risen from around 45% to more than 53%.

SegWit usage is increasing rapidly

SegWit, a protocol that enables, among other things, more efficient and cost-effective Bitcoin transactions for users, is increasingly used by Bitcoin users, wallet providers and exchanges. The most successful month so far was May: the number of Segway transactions relative to “normal” transactions increased from 27 percent to nearly 40 percent.

The increase in SegWit transactions has resulted in the largest ever block of Bitcoin being mined. Bitcoin block 540107 was 2.26 MB in size, including a total of 230 transactions. This means that the SegWit usage is increasing and that miners are able to mine larger bitcoin blocks. This allows more transactions per second to be processed, while keeping transaction fees at a relatively low level, benefiting Bitcoin users in particular.

Bech32 the next step

SegWit addresses start with the number 3 (P2SH address). But there is another format called “bech32” for Bitcoin addresses: For bech32 the addresses start with “bc1”. These addresses use fewer characters than current addresses, and there is no more case sensitivity, which benefits the user. Since the Bitcoin Core Wallet 0.16.0 it is possible to use bech32 addresses.

However, bech32 is not supported by all wallet providers: Tanjalo, Electrum, Purse, Globee, Wasabi Wallet, Greenaddress, Opennode, HOARD, Coinomi and Samourai Wallet currently support whensegwit. However, many vendors are willing to, or have agreed to support, bech32, e.g. Trezor, Coinbase, Changelly and Kraken.

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