SegWit, acronym for Segregated Witness, is the update of the bitcoin protocol that allows faster and cheaper transactions, and it has recently reached an adoption of more than 50%.
The previous adoption record was 48.1%, set at the end of July.
The importance of SegWit
This protocol, introduced two years ago, requires less data to process a transaction compared to the classic format which requires a block size of about 1 MB and an average network speed of around 4 transactions per second.
In addition, SegWit has introduced a slight upgrade of the block size, which as reported by Diar, are constantly increasing, reaching an average size of 1.2 MB per block.
According to some studies, if the adoption of SegWit reached 100%, it would be possible to increase the throughput of the bitcoin network by a factor of 4.
Unfortunately, there are still too many wallets that have not upgraded to SegWit despite the fact that it has been released about two years ago. The main wallets, including Trezor and Ledger, were quick to introduce the upgrade, but many others, especially many exchanges, proceeded slowly so as to guarantee total security when switching protocols.
In order to see immediately if a service, exchange or wallet has implemented SegWit it is enough to look at how the BTC address starts: the SegWit addresses all start with the number 3 instead of the classic 1.
SegWit on Litecoin
Although the adoption of SegWit has reached remarkable results on the Bitcoin blockchain, these do not yet reach the level of use that can be found on Litecoin.
LTC has in fact adopted SegWit before bitcoin, acting as a real test ground for the new technology. As a result of the earlier introduction, Litecoin can now count on an adoption rate of around 69%.
