By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 19th, 2024
A consensus on how to increase the blockchain network capacity has finally been reached, pushing the price of the digital currency to a new record high.
So far, the bitcoin community has been unable to come to a common decision on how to solve the scaling issue of the bitcoin network. A range of solutions, including SegWit and Bitcoin Unlimited, have been proposed by cryptocurrency users over the last year.
The scaling debates may soon come to an end as a number of major bitcoin industry players have reached an agreement at the Consensus conference in New York. The head of the Digital Currency Group, Barry Silbert, published a post on Medium, explaining the details.
The scaling agreement was reached right on time as the bitcoin network was recently halted, with more than 214,000 bitcoin transactions being stuck.
The announcement from Barry Silbert urged investors to acquire bitcoin, which reached a new record high today. Just two days after breaking $2,300 barrier, the digital currency surpassed $2,400 level and hit $2472. At the moment of writing, bitcoin is worth $2459.19, according to CoinMarketCap. The cryptocurrency increased by 7.13% over the last 24 hours.
The project was supported by a group of 56 companies across 21 countries that represent 83.28% of hashing power on the blockchain network, 20.5 million bitcoin wallets and $5.1 billion monthly on transaction volume.
The companies agreed to activate the Segregated Witness proposal at an 80% threshold, what is lower than the previously proposed barrier of 95%. Besides, the solution includes the implementation of a hard fork in the next six months that will raise bitcoin’s block size limit from the current 1MB to 2MB.
Bitcoin.com, BitFury, Bitmain, Abra, Bitclub Network, Circle, RSK Labs, BitPay, Blockchain, Bloq, and Xapo have committed to provide their engineering and technical support to upgrade the system.
“We are also committed to the research and development of technical mechanisms to improve signaling in the bitcoin community, as well as to put in place communication tools, in order to more closely coordinate with ecosystem participants in the design, integration, and deployment of safe solutions that increase bitcoin capacity,” the post reads.
Sarah Maxwell, Blockchain.com, told Cointelegraph: “The consensus realized today reflects our collective desire to see the industry move forward. We are grateful to join these partners and are committed to helping Bitcoin reach its full potential to improve the lives of billions across the globe.”
Meantime, Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury, commented: “We are glad that consensus has been finally reached. BitFury, along with vast majority, is fully supporting this historic decision. This is a very important moment for the ecosystem with this solution setting the new chapter for the Bitcoin technology.”