Most major Bitcoin wallet service providers, exchanges and startups have either planned Segregated Witness (SegWit) support or are SegWit support ready.
The Bitcoin Core development team recently updated its list of 73 Bitcoin startups that have announced their plans to support SegWit. Amongst the list was popular Bitcoin wallet service providers Blockchain.info, AirBitz, Armory, BreadWallet, Trezor, Samourai Wallet, Ledger hardware wallet, Electrum, GreenAddress, KeepKey and Mycelium.
Various mining pools including Slush, Bitfury, BTCC, CGMiner and CKPool signalled SegWit support, as well as major Bitcoin exchanges including Bitfinex, OKCoin and Coinfloor.
Bitcoin wallet service providers
Hardware wallet manufacturers and developers Trezor, Ledger and KeepKey have always been strong supporters of SegWit, particularly due to the major issues surrounding Bitcoin hardware wallets, which SegWit promises to solve.
In an interview, Jonas Schnelli, Bitcoin Core and Digital Bitbox developer, explained that hardware wallets can become vulnerable to a fee attack, which could list all Bitcoins stored on a hardware wallet as the input for a transaction and attribute a huge fee to the miner.
Schnelli stated that if a computer is compromised by a Trojan horse and it automatically increases input amounts of a transaction, it could lead to a difficult issue for a hardware wallet user to deal with.
Marek Palatinus, Trezor developer, also stated:
“There are other issues with Bitcoin under the hood, and SegWit opens potential for applications and use-cases that are not possible today. For those who think only bigger blocks will save Bitcoin’s exchange rate, and for miners who are going to decide on whether or not they should adopt SegWit, this is important to understand.”
Based on this solution, which SegWit offers to hardware wallets alone, hardware wallet developers explain that it should be implemented for the benefits of users.
More to that, Henry Brade, CEO at Blockchain startup Prasos, which operates popular physical Bitcoin manufacturer Denarium Bitcoin, noted that SegWit will “more than double the Bitcoin transaction capacity,” surpassing the original capacity increase prediction of 1.7x.
BashCo, a Bitcoin Reddit moderator, also emphasized that once SegWit is activated, more on-chain scaling solutions, such as Schnorr signatures and MAST, can be implemented, which will ultimately enhance privacy and smart contracts.
For most wallet providers, this significant increase in transaction capacity should be beneficial for their platforms, as it prevents any further delays with transaction confirmation and settlement.
SegWit opens up Bitcoin to more solutions
In various polls and surveys, a significantly large number of Bitcoin Unlimited supporters surprisingly favored the idea of SegWit activation, expressing their optimism towards the soft fork.
Regardless of the block size debate, SegWit offers the on-chain scaling solution, which is beneficial to the Bitcoin network despite the block size limit. Although the Bitcoin network may go through a block size increase and capacity expansion in the future, it is important to acknowledge that SegWit will more than double the current transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network.
Considering the benefits of SegWit, wallet service providers like Mycelium announced that they are carrying out some more testing and implementing user interface changes to properly execute SegWit implementation. Mycelium has specifically stated that basic implementation is already complete.
Samourai Wallet, a prominent Bitcoin wallet service provider, went as far as creating a website called Segwit.co, which allows its users to track SegWit activation progress.
The Samourai Wallet development team is also actively taking user suggestions on social media and online Bitcoin communities to embed various data points and include information which users may find useful.
Earlier this week, the Samourai team stated that it is planning to show all 26 possible activation periods to demonstrate the number of chances it has left of being activated.