Segregated Witness (SegWit) has activated on Bitcoin. As of today, all SegWit-ready nodes on the Bitcoin network are enforcing the new rules, marking Bitcoin’s biggest protocol upgrade to date.
The final step for Segregated Witness is, of course, actual user adoption. It’s impossible to know how quickly and how much the upgrade will actually be used. Some critics, perhaps most notably Garzik, predict that widespread adoption could take up to a year or even longer.
Others, including a number of wallet and library developers, think they can utilize the feature within weeks, or they are prepared already. And other technologies that depend on the upgrade, such as the Lightning Network, but also Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), atomic swaps, faster transaction signing for hardware wallets, the more efficient Schnorr signature algorithm, and TumbleBit in payment processor mode, are in various stages of development as well.
Anyone who wants to use Segregated Witness should now be able to do so, starting today.