SegWit-enabled transactions hit new highs as Bitcoin remains below $12,000

Bitcoin’s rollercoaster movement has been the highlight of the cryptocurrency market, with several altcoins following the patterns set by the world’s largest digital asset. After Bitcoin fell back into a cycle of slow sideways movement, large-cap altcoins like Ethereum and XRP showed similar behavior on the charts, with minuscule changes in their price and market cap.

Apart from Bitcoin’s price, several other factors have also contributed to an overall growth in the Bitcoin ecosystem. These factors ranged from the BTC hash rate hitting its ATH, to a spike in the overall Bitcoin transaction volume. Latest reports further show that Bitcoin’s Segwit transactions also hit a high, encompassing 56 percent of all BTC transactions. This was also pointed out Jameson Lopp, Chief Technical Officer of satoshi.info, who tweeted,

“SegWit-enabled spends recently touched 56% of daily transactions despite some major services still not supporting it. If your wallet/exchange/ other service is still giving you deposit addresses that start with a “1” it’s time to ask them “when SegWit?”

Segwit-enabled transactions had begun spiking at around the same time as when Bitcoin’s price started picking up on the charts. This was during the 2-week rally when Bitcoin jumped in value substantially and started moving towards the $10,000 mark. The month of March was a major contributor in increasing the hold of Segwit transactions in the Bitcoin ecosystem, with 48.73 percent of all transactions involving Segwit-enabled movement.

A Segwit spending payment is a transaction that spends one or more SegWit outputs. SegWit’s dominance comes in the wake of information that stated Bitcoin transaction fees were the lowest ever when Bitcoin was above the $13,000 mark. During the great bull run of 2017, Bitcoin transaction fees was recorded to be $18, while the present average transaction fees is clocked at $1.30.

SegWit was also in the spotlight after BitMEX, a popular cryptocurrency exchange, admitted using the technology to reduce transaction fees. The collective voice of the crypto-community dissing the increasing fees forced BitMEX to look into the technology, with the company stating,

“It [SegWit] is bundled with some other backend upgrades to systems that will allow us to monitor many more addresses and rotate them more freely.”