Bitcoin and its blockchain network continue to grow. Segregated Witness (SegWit) one of the scalability solutions implemented by Bitcoin, has registered new records. In October, the number of transactions using SegWit accounted for 50% of the total number of payments.
SegWit Adoption Continues to Grow
The SegWit Protocol continues to offer a momentaneous solution to Bitcoin’s scalability issues. This time, the number of SegWit transactions jumped from 45% up to 53% at the beginning of October.
SegWit allows the Bitcoin network to process faster transactions paying lower fees. After being implemented in 2017, it has steadily grown during the current year. At the beginning of 2018, SegWit adoption was just 14%. That means that since January, the number of SegWit transactions has grown 3.6 times. Only in October, it spiked from 43% to 53%. May and March were the most important months related to SegWit adoption.
Due to the increased amount of transactions using SegWit, Bitcoin’s block 540107 was the biggest block ever mined. This block had 2.26 megabytes since the technology allows the blockchain to have bigger blocks.
Although SegWit seems a good solution to the scalability issues faced by Bitcoin, it is not definitive. Bitcoin developers are working in order to create a second layer solution to process millions of transactions per second. The off-chain scaling proposal is known as Lightning Network and is currently being tested. With it, it would not be necessary to increase Bitcoin block size or modify Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain network. Transactions can easily be performed out of the blockchain and be broadcasted later.
However, the scaling debate has divided the community. Back in August 2017, Bitcoin’s network forked into two different chains, one of them known as Bitcoin Cash (BCH). BCH supporters consider that the best of scaling Bitcoin’s network is to increase the block size.
Bitcoin Cash is currently the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $8.91 billion dollars. Bitcoin, instead, has a market cap of $113.8 billion dollars.
In the next months, more platforms could start implementing SegWit addresses and help Bitcoin’s network to scale.
Carlos is an international relations’ analyst specializing in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Since 2017, Carlos has written extensively for UseTheBitcoin and other leading cryptocurrency sites; with over 2,000 articles published.
