Coinbase's crypto exchange house tweeted Monday, Feb. 5 that will soon implement the Segregated Witness (SegWit) scalability update for Bitcoin addresses, which will help reduce transaction times and fees for sending and receiving Bitcoin (BTC).
While they are in the final stages of testing for the implementation of SegWit, Coinbase reminds customers that they prioritize security and performance against new features by linking to their posting on the 2017 blog about the topic.
Our engineering team has started the final testing phase of SegWit for Bitcoin at Coinbase. Shipments / receipts compatible with SegWit will be made available to customers in the coming weeks. We wrote about SegWit on our blog.
Coinbase first announced the decision to add the SegWit update in early December 2017. The update, introduced by the Bitcoin Core development team in August 2017, addresses Bitcoin's scalability problem by reducing the size of transactions.
Moving the witnesses to the end of each transaction solves the problem of malleability of Bitcoin that is conducive to second layer solutions such as the Lightning Network.
The popular crypto wallets Trezor and Ledger upgraded to SegWit shortly after the August release.
Slow transaction times and network congestion have affected Bitcoin traders in recent months, with some Blockchain-based businesses moving away from BTC due to ever-higher transaction rates.
The North American Bitcoin Conference had to stop accepting crypto-coins for the conference in early January, citing that "network congestion and manual processing" would make it impossible to meet print deadlines.
Software engineer and cypherpunk Jameson Lopp in mid-January blamed the services of cryptos such as Coinbase, Blockchain and Gemini for causing network congestion because they are "using block space inefficiently".
It's not a new revelation that a significant cause of bitcoin network congestion are popular services like 
Coinbase customers had filed a petition a month ago to make the SegWit upgrade a priority for Coinbase, eventually obtaining more than 12,000 signatures. With the February 5 tweet, the petition added an update:
"Coinbase finally listened to us and is currently prioritizing SegWit's implementation of new features! [...] We are on course for a better future for Bitcoin :)".
Tags: #bitcoin #crypto #segwit #coinbase #money
Author: Cointelegraph