The percentage of Segregated Witness (SegWit)-spending Bitcoin (BTC) transactions has reached 50.5%, or an all-time high, according to transactionfee.info statistics.
SegWit solution to Bitcoin transactions
SegWit is a proposed update to the Bitcoin Core, which is designed to reduce processing and wait times. Originally, the update was aimed at solving transaction malleability, a well-known weak spot in Bitcoin software. However, SegWit offers a range of other advantages and now the focus of attention has shifted from fixing transaction malleability to solving the problem of Bitcoin scaling.
Explaining its metrics, transactionfee.info points out that a Bitcoin transaction can have multiple outputs and can therefore transfer funds to multiple recipients. The payments metric counts the number of outputs of a transaction and subtracts one, while a transaction that spends one or more SegWit outputs is considered a SegWit transaction.
Percentage of SegWit-spending Bitcoin payments. Source: transactionfee.info
Historical trends of Bitcoin transactions
As previously reported, average Bitcoin transaction fees increased by nearly 200% in April compared to March. The on-chain transaction volume reportedly rose 43% during April and resulted in full blocks, while SegWit approached 40% of the total transactions per block and blocks regularly exceeded the one-megabyte block limit. The average SegWit usage was 26% in 2018.
Back in February, when daily Bitcoin transaction volumes surged to levels not seen since January 2018, after Bitcoin hit the $20,000 price mark, Jameson Lopp, the CTO at Bitcoin personal key security system firm Casa, argued:
“Lower transaction demand, improved fee estimation algorithms, adoption of SegWit, and transaction batching have resulted in more efficient use of block space and less contention for this scarce resource.”
This summer, Bitcoin Core version 0.16.1 was released, a new major version including “new features, various bugfixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.”