In a few weeks, Coinbase will offer their customers an update on Bitcoin SegWit which is expected to improve transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network.
Coinbase has announced its plans to implement SegWit (Segregated Witness) for Bitcoin in 2018 with a view to make Bitcoin transactions cheaper and faster.
According to the company’s Twitter post, the engineering team is working on final testing of Segwit. So, the customers will have an opportunity to get familiarized with the update in a few weeks.
Our engineering team has begun the final testing phase of SegWit for Bitcoin on Coinbase.
SegWit compatible Bitcoin sends/receives will be available for customers in the next few weeks.
We previously wrote about SegWit on our blog: https://t.co/3YPQPkYy4C
— Coinbase 🛡️ (@coinbase) February 5, 2018
The purpose of SegWit creation was to solve the problems of malleability and scalability. The aim of SegWit introduction was to mitigate a blockchain size limitation problem and, consequently, make Bitcoin transaction faster.
All these tasks can be fulfilled due to splitting the transaction into two segments, removing the unlocking signature from the original portion and transforming it into a separate structure called “segregated witness” at the end. The original section still holds the data of senders and receivers, and the new “witness” structure contains scripts and signatures.
So, via SegWit upgrade the size of transactions is reduced, which contributes to the overall improvement of the Bitcoin network transaction capacity. Moreover, the fees that customers pay on bitcoin transactions are to be reduced as well. Further details are promised to become public later.
Nevertheless, Coinbase highlights that security of their customers’ funds has always been one of their key priorities as well as performance of their platform even during the periods of heavy workloads. That’s way the team is always trying to implement all changes with significant attention and consideration for the security and stability of the platform.
By the way, SegWit adoption has already gained some visible results. Its implementation peaked last week when its transactions made up more than 18% of transactions for the first time in its history.
In the context of scalability problem solving, we should also recall the development of another promising concept – Lightning Network. Being initially introduced with an aim just to make the Bitcoin network more useful, the Lightning Network is a decentralized network of “payment channels” that allows users to make micropayments between two parties without a necessity to broadcast directly to the blockchain. As a result, transaction fees are decreasing, the speed of the whole payment process is growing while privacy is strengthening. Last week we wrote about the first Bitcoin ATM transaction made using the Lightning Network that was realized by the Austria-based cryptocurrency startup Coinfinity.
At the moment, Bitcoin is trading at $6 802,43, according to the data from CoinMarketCap. If to speculate over possible reasons for its price fall, block of access to foreign crypto exchanges for Chinese investors might be the answer.
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