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We had earlier reported that Coinbase engineers are working towards implementation of SegWit address, which can be used by its customers to send and receive Bitcoins for a lower miner fee and an improvement in transaction time. Coinbase has announced that the support for SegWit addresses is available to customers.
Over the next few days, customers of Coinbase will be able to start using the SegWit addresses to send and receive Bitcoin and Litecoin. The facility is expected to save confirmation cost and improve transaction time.
Segregated Witness decreases the size of Bitcoin transactions. This allows a greater number of transactions to pass through the network at any given point in time. Additionally, it provides more security to the Bitcoin network, while improving transaction malleability and scalability.
Coingate and BTC.com are already providing support to SegWit addresses. Eventhough SegWit was implemented in Bitcoin network in August 2017, the facility came into adoption only in January 2018. SegWit addresses made up nearly 18% of the total Bitcoin transactions at its peak in January. It is currently hovering at about 15%.
Bitcoin Core version 0.16.0, which offers total support to SegWit was released last week. That is expected to further popularize the use of SegWit addresses among users of Bitcoin.
When Bitcoin was trading near $17,000 in December, transaction charges hit a high of about 1,200 Satoshis per bytes. It has now dropped to 110 Satsoshis. The arrival of SegWit is expected to keep the transaction costs low. The crypto community is eagerly waiting for the implementation of Lightning Network facility on the mainnet. That is expected to hasten mass adoption of Bitcoin.
