SegWit Bitcoin Transactions Now Over 50%

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.

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.”