The level of adoption has not registered significant growth in the last year. Approximately 132,000 transactions have been made following the protocol for two years.
On August 23rd, two years after the implementation of SegWit (Segregated Witness) in the Bitcoin network, it has reached an adoption rate of 42% to date. The proposal of the company Blockstream and the development team of the customer Bitcoin Core officially came to light in 2017, during the mining of block 481.822.
The improvement was published in 2015 under BIP-141 by Pieter Wuille, Johnson Lau and Eric Lombrozo, with the goal of helping improve Bitcoin’s scalability. In May 2017, the necessary consensus for its activation was achieved, after observing that the network began to become congested, until it was full of unconfirmed transactions.
Subsequently, in July 2017, the miners followed the protocol described in the BIP-141 proposal, taking the first steps to perform the update. Then, on August 9th of that same year they managed to check the compatibility with SegWit, until the activation was finally done on August 23rd.
SegWit was implemented with the idea of enabling the Bitcoin blockchain to handle more transactions in less time, managing to reduce the high transfer fees paid by users. For this reason, the SegWit protocol opened the doors for the network to operate with larger block sizes, bringing the maximum block size from 1 MB to 4 MB.
In this way, updates on the size of the blocks of the network are guaranteed, without having to apply a hard fork. In addition, it is possible to reduce competition for priority rates among users and facilitate the reduction of network fees.
Sustained Adoption
SegWit is a software function designed to improve the efficiency of transactions and reduce the cost of the fees on the network. Since it was activated, several exchange houses and wallet services have been activating their functions in search of better results.
The use of the protocol was growing gradually since its inception. By October 2017 SegWit already had more than 10% adoption, but these levels became noticeable in the first months of 2018. Between the end of February and the beginning of March of that year the percentage of transactions went from 14.5% to 30% of total network volume. The progress was sustained that year until it reached an all-time high of 51.6% in October 2018.
At the same time, after reaching this all-time high, from the end of 2018 until today, the process of adoption of SegWit has been more or less constant, with oscillations that range from 30% to a little over 40% of the volume of transactions of the network.
According to SegWit Space statistics, for this second anniversary, the protocol shows an adoption rate of 42.4%. Besides, according to Charts Woobull graphics, on August 21st the network registered a total of 132,000 transactions with SegWit, out of a total of 332,000 transactions made in Bitcoin.
The adoption pace does not show extraordinary increases compared to the data that was available on the first anniversary of SegWit. However, its presence is active on the network and together with Lightning Network offers users lower rates and solutions to transaction malleability problems.
By Willmen Blanco
