Coinbase’s professional trading platform Global Digital Asset Exchange GDAX announced it has implemented Segregated Witness (SegWit) support for Bitcoin transactions in a blog post published Friday, Feb. 23.
The platform characterizes SegWit technology as “a critical step forward in the development of Bitcoin” and promises support for SegWit transactions will be made available to 100% of their customers “over the coming days”. Coinbase announced Feb. 20 that SegWit testing on the platform was complete and that they’d begun a “phased launch”, of which Friday’s GDAX announcement is evidently a part, with the target of providing 100% support for all customers by this coming week.
SegWit technology is designed to reduce transactions times and fees on the Bitcoin network. Many popular Bitcoin exchanges and services have been plagued network congestion from inefficient use of block space, a problem SegWit seeks to solve, resulting in widespread frustration among customers.
The past week has seen several major SegWit adoption milestones. The latest version of Bitcoin Core, which was released for public editing Feb. 15, introduced full SegWit support for the first time. Just a few days later, on Feb. 20, the same day Coinbase said it had finished SegWit testing, major crypto exchange platform Bitfinex also announced full SegWit support for all customers.
This week was also marked by record low transaction fees on the Bitcoin network, down significantly from all-time highs in December, 2017 and January, 2018.
When GDAX announced that Bitcoin Cash (BCH) would be available to trade on their platform in mid January 2018, the news fell flat for many traders, who would have rather seen the implementation of SegWit on the platform prioritized.
Moving forward, GDAX also noted in their blog post that they’re committed to implementing additional scaling solutions for the Bitcoin network, including so-called ‘Layer 2’ solution, the Lightning Network.