More BTC Transactions Now Use SegWIT After BitMEX Embraced It

More BTC transactions now use the so-called Segregated Witness or SegWit technology than ever before as the latest data shows which we are reading more about in the latest bitcoin news.

According to multiple types of research including SegWit.Space, the adoption of the SegWit protocol reached about 66 percent of all Bitcoin transactions as of today. The volume gained a high increase in late 2019, jumping from about 40 percent in September to about 60 percent in October. The statistics however vary. SegWit.space is a dedicated monitoring resource that lists the current SegWit propagation as 66 percent. Some of the other charts such as the transactionfee.info and Woobull as the data resource by Willy Woo shows currently put the figure at about 59%.

All three, however, agree on the general trend that the SegWit usage is highly bullish which has had a long road to the acceptance since its release in 2017. The protocol was designed to increase the speed and efficiency of the Bitcoin transactions and to also reduce their bulk which didn’t really gain a lot of implementation initially. The Bitcoin proponents argued that the exchanges are reluctant to make the effort to adopt the technology and are only throwing needless strains on the BTC network as more BTC transactions start to use it.

Binance will upgrade in the near future and still uses the legacy Bitcoin addresses. The platform’s CEO Changpeng Zhao known as CZ in the crypto community, claimed back in May last year that the developers would be working on addressing the issue. In October, the popular bitcoin supporter Udi Wertheimer even pledged to advertise the SegWit personally. The derivatives giant BitMEX which is another exchange popular in the sector that added the native support to its platform last month.

The announcement fully explains how and why the BitMEX exchange enables this support. It also details that the Bitcoin network currently supports three address formats. The first one is Bitcoin’s original address format which is pay to public key hash (P2PKH) which starts with a 1. On the other hand, the second format is the pay to script hash (P2SH) which lets users send BTC to addresses secured through a script without even knowing details about it.